The silent world of Nicholas Quinn Read Online Free Page A

in
    —just for a second—before they started the business of the afternoon.
    Monica . . . It must have been the wine.
    They finally arrived back at the Syndicate building at twenty minutes to
    three; and whilst the others were making their leisurely way back to 1the
    Revision Room upstairs, Quinn himself walked quickly along the corridor
    and gently knocked on the furthest door on the right, whereon the name
    plate read. MISS M. M. HEIGHT. He tentatively opened the door and
    looked in. No one. But he saw a note prominently displayed beneath a
    paperweight on the neatly cleared desk, and he stepped inside to read it.
    'Gone to Paolo's. Back at three.' It was typical of their office life together.
    Bartlett never minded his staff coming and going just when and how they
    liked, so long as their work was adequately done. What he did insist upon,
    however (almost pathologically), was that everyone should keep him
    informed about exactly where they could be found. So. Monica had gone to
    have her comely hair coiffured. Never mind. He didn't know what he would
    have said, anyway. Yes, it was just as well: he would see her in the
    morning.
    He walked up to the Revision Room, where Cedric Voss was leaning back
    in his chair, his eyes half-closed, an inane grin upon his flabby, somnolent
    features. 'Well, gentlemen. Can we please try to turn our attention to the
    Hanoverians?'

CHAPTER TWO
    BY THE MIDDLE of the nineteenth century radical reforms were afoot in Oxford; and by
    its end a series of Commissions, Statutes, and Parliamentary Bills had inaugurated
    changes which were to transform the life of both Town and Gown. The University
    syllabuses were extended to include the study of the emergent sciences, and of
    modern history; the high academic standards set by Benjamin Jowett's Balliol
    gradually spread to other colleges; the establishment of professorial chairs
    increasingly attracted to Oxford scholars of international renown; the secularization of
    the college fellowships began to undermine the traditionally religious framework of
    university discipline and administration; and young men of Romanist, Judaic, and
    other strange persuasions were now admitted as undergraduates, no longer willy-nilly
    to be weaned on Cicero and Chrysostom. But, above all, university teaching was no
    longer concentrated in the hands of the celibate and cloistered clergymen, some of
    whom, as in Gibbon's day, well remembered that they had a salary to receive, and
    only forgot that they had a duty to perform; and many of the newly-appointed fellows,
    and some of the old, forswore the attractions of bachelor rooms in the college, got
    themselves married, and bought houses for themselves, their wives, their offspring,
    and their servants, immediately outside the old spiritual centre of Holywell and the
    High, the Broad and St. Giles'; especially did they venture north of the great width of
    tree-lined St. Giles', where the Woodstock and the Banbury Roads branched off into
    the fields of North Oxford, towards the village of Summertown.
    A traveller who visits Oxford today, and who walks northward from St. Giles', is struck
    immediately by the large, imposing houses, mostly dating from the latter half of the
    nineteenth century, that line the Woodstock and the Banbury Roads and the streets
    that cross their ways between them. Apart from the blocks of weathered yellow stone
    round the white-painted window frames, these three-storeyed houses are built of
    attractive reddish brick, and are roofed with small rectangular tiles, more of an orange-
    red, which slope down from the clustered chimney stacks aslant the gabled windows.
    Today few of the houses are occupied by single families. They are too large, too cold,
    and too expensive to maintain; the rates are too high and salaries (it is said) are too
    low, and the fast-disappearing race of domestic servan1ts demands a colour telly in
    the sitting-room. So it is that most of the houses have been let into