Mr.chips chapter 4

CHAPTER 4
There came to him, stirred by the warmth of the fire and the gentle aroma of tea, a thousand tangled recollections of old times. Spring - the Spring of 1896. He was forty-eight-an age at which a permanence of habits begins to be predictable. He had just been appointed housemaster; with this and his classical forms, he had made for himself a warm and busy corner of life. During the summer vacation he went up to the Lake District with Rowden, a colleague. They walked and climbed for a week, until Rowden had to leave suddenly on some family business, Chips stayed on al^ne at Wasdale Head, where he boarded in a small farmhouse. One day, climbing on Great Gable, he noticed a girl waving excitedly from a dangerous looking ledge. Thinking she was in difficulties he hastened towards her^ but in doing so slipped himself and wrenched his ankle. As it turned out, she was not in difficulties at all, but was merely signaling to a friend farther down the mountain; she v-^& an expert climber, better even than Chips, who was pretty good. Thus he found himself the rescued instead of the rescuer; and neither role was one for which he had much relish. For he did not, he would have said, care for women; he never felt at hume or at ease with them; and that monstrous creature, beginning to be talked about, the New Woman of the, nineties, filled him with horror. He was a quiet, conventional person, and the world, viewed from the haven of Brookfield, seemed to him full of distasteful innovations; there was a fellow named Bernard Shaw who had the strangest and most reprehensible opinions; there was Ibsen, too, with his disturbing plays; and there was this new craze for bicycling which was being taken up by women equally with men. Chips did not hold with all this modern newness and freedom. He had a vague notion, if he ever formulated it, that nice women were weak, timid, and delicate, and that nice men treated them with a polite but rather distant chivalry. He had not, therefore, expected to find a
woman on Great Gable; but having encountered one who seemed to need masculine help, it was even more terrifying that she should turn the tables by-helping him. For she did..She and her friend had to. He could scarcely walk, and it was a hard job getting him down the steep track to Wasdale.