Let me return to the College anniversary.

A distinguishing feature of all such English establishments is that they exist for you – and not you for them. In the public gardens, the most gorgeous flowers grow without being in any way fenced in. You can pick them if you want to, but you won't do it because they are yours. Precisely because you have been granted full use of them, you will not do anything to damage them. The same holds for museums and libraries. In the British Museum, books stand on the shelves ready to hand; you take them from the shelf without asking permission of anyone. And this is precisely why you have no intention of tearing any pages out of them; you feel that they are your property.

Our College operates on the same system. The College has been created for my convenience, which means that if I want to, say, dance in the refectory, I have the right – without asking any persons in charge – to move aside the furniture, to drag in the piano from the neighbouring room and to invite the scullery maid from the kitchen for one turn of the cakewalk. It often happened in winter that you’d come into the ‘coffee room’ only to see a gentleman stretched out on each settee and taking a quiet nap. How surprised they would be if a set of ‘rules’ appeared in their College forbidding such postures. That would seem to them every bit as strange as a ban on kissing their own wives.

The convictions of all these gentlemen… But, reader, are you familiar with the ‘Panama’ hat? A good Panama hat costs thirty or forty roubles, which is why you’ll find it on the heads of rich mill-owners, fashionable doctors, lords, and so on. But could a poor clerk – who melts with rapture as he observes all these lucky ones on Rotten Row in Hyde Park every Sunday – possibly wear anything else on his own head after he has seen Duke So-and-so sporting a Panama?