The Youth of Parnassus and Other Stories

He came straight to Oxford from his American home, Parnassus City, a town in the Western State of Indiana.The first time Foley saw him was one wet October evening, when, splashing across the quadrangle towards his rooms, he noticed a large umbrella moving through the dripping twilight-an umbrella which, from its undecided motion, must belong, he had told himself, to some tourist, who, in spite of the rain and darkness, was finishing a day of sight-seeing at St. Mary's. But when the umbrella collapsed in front of his own staircase, and Foley saw the spectacles and pale face of a young man who turned to enter there, he decided that it must be an agent, come to collect money for missions or something of the kind. And as he followed upstairs, in the wet footprints of the feet he could still hear mounting above him, he asked himself with vague annoyance what right they had-people like that-to push themselves into the rooms of Oxford men.