From Stella about the same time, Michael also received a letter.

Michael was glad that there seemed a prospect of employing his vacation in abolishing the thin red house in Carlington Road. He felt he would have found it queerly shriveled after the spaciousness of Oxford. He was sufficiently far along in his first term to be able to feel the privilege of possessing the High, and he could think of no other word to describe the sensation of walking down that street in company with Lonsdale and Grainger and others of his friends.

Only Avery’s loose-fronted shirt marred the rigid convention of the group.

“Who’s that man wearing a pie-frill?” whispered Alan sternly from Michael’s right.

Michael looked up at him with an expression of amused apprehension.

“Avery allows himself a little license,” said Michael. “But, Alan, he’s really all right. He always wears his trousers turned up, and if you saw him on Sunday you’d think he was perfectly dressed. All Old Carthusians are.”

But Alan still looked disapprovingly at Avery, until Lonsdale, who had met Alan several times at the House, began to talk of friends they had in common.

Michael was not altogether pleased with himself. He wished he had put Avery on his left instead of Wedderburn. He disliked owning to himself that he had put Avery at the other end of the table to avoid the responsibility of listening to the loudly voiced opinions which he felt grated upon the others. He looked anxiously along toward Avery, who waved a cheery hand. Michael perceived with pleasure and faint relief that he seemed to be amusing his neighbor, a Wykehamist called Castleton.

Opposite to Avery was Cuffe, and as Michael looked at Cuffe he was more than ever displeased with himself. The invitation to Cuffe was a detestable tribute to public opinion. Cuffe was a prominent freshman, and Michael had asked him for no other reason than because Cuffe would certainly have been asked to any other so representative a gathering of St. Mary’s freshmen as this one might be considered. But a representative gathering of this kind was not exactly what Michael had intended to achieve with his terminal dinner. He looked at Cuffe with distaste. Then, too, in the middle of the table were Cranborne, Sterne, and Sinclair, not one of whom was there from Michael’s desire to have him, but from some ridiculous tradition of his suitableness. However, it was useless to resent their presence now and, as the champagne went round, gradually Michael forgot his predilections and was content to see his first terminal dinner a success of wine and good-fellowship.

Soon Lonsdale was on his feet making a speech, and Michael sat back and smiled benignly on the company he had collected, while Lonsdale discussed their individual excellencies.

CHEYNE WALK

The Christmas vacation was spent in searching London for a new house. Mrs. Fane, when Carlington Road was with a sigh of relief at last abandoned, would obviously have preferred to go abroad at once and postpone the consideration of a future residence; but Michael with Stella’s support prevailed upon her to take more seriously the problem of their new home.

Michael was waiting for Mrs. Fane, who as usual was late. Mr. Prescott was to be there to give his approval and advice, and Michael was anxious to meet this man who had evidently been a very intimate friend of his father. He saw Prescott in his mind as he had seen him years ago, an intruder upon the time-shrouded woes of childhood, and as he was trying to reconstruct the image of a florid jovial man, whose only definite impression had been made by the gold piece he had pressed into Michael’s palm, a hansom pulled up at the house and someone, fair and angular with a military awkwardness, alighting from it, knocked at the door. Michael crossed the road quickly and asked if he were Mr. Prescott. Himself explained who he was and, opening the front door, led the way into the empty house. He was conscious, as he showed room after room to Prescott, that the visitor was somehow occupied less with the observation of the house than with a desire to achieve in regard to Michael himself a tentative advance toward intimacy. The January sun that sloped thin golden ladders across the echoing spaces of the bare rooms expressed for Michael something of the sensation which Prescott’s attitude conveyed to him, the sensation of a benign and delicate warmth that could most easily melt away, stretching out toward certain unused depths of his heart.

“I suppose you knew my father very well,” said Michael at last, blushing as he spoke at the uninspired obviousness of the remark.

“Do you mean to people’s failings?” Michael asked.

Michael did not ask this so much because he believed that was what Prescott really meant as because he wished to encourage him to speak out clearly at once so that, when later they met again, the hard shyness of preliminary encounters would have been softened. Moreover, this empty house glinting with golden motes seemed to encourage a frankness and directness of intercourse that made absurd these roundabout postponements of actual problems.

“Charitable to societies,” Prescott explained. “I don’t want her to think she’s got to endow half a dozen committees with money and occupation.”

“Stella’s a little worried about mother’s charities,” Michael admitted.

“Awful good sort, Stella,” Prescott jerked out. “Frightens me devilishly. Never could stand very clever people. Oh, I like them very much, but I always feel like a piece of furniture they want to move out of their way. Used to be in the Welsh Guards with your father,” he added vaguely.

“Did you know my father when he first met my mother?” Michael asked directly, and by his directness tripped up Prescott into a headlong account.

Michael was saved from any declaration of his intentions by a ring at the front door, which shrilled like an alarm through the empty house. Soon all embarrassments were lost in his mother’s graceful and elusive presence that seemed to furnish every room in turn with rich associations of leisure and tranquillity, and with its fine assurance to muffle all the echoes and the emptiness. Stella, who had arrived with Mrs. Fane, was rushing from window to window, trying patterns of chintz and damask and Roman satin; and all her notions of decoration that she flung up like released birds seemed to flutter for a while in a confusion of winged argument between her and Michael, while Mr. Prescott listened with an expression on his wrinkling forehead of admiring perplexity. But every idea would quickly be gathered in by Mrs. Fane, and when she had smoothed its ruffled doubts and fears, it would fly with greater certainty, until room by room and window by window and corner by corner the house was beautifully and sedately and appropriately arranged.

“I give full marks to Prescott,” said Stella later in the afternoon to Michael. “He’s like a nice horse.”

“I think we ought to have had green curtains in the spare room,” said Michael.

And when Michael tried to discover a reason, it was difficult to find one.

“Well, why not?” he at last very lamely replied.

There followed upon that curiously staccato conversation between Michael and Prescott in the empty house a crowded time of furnishing, while Mrs. Fane with Michael and Stella stayed at the Sloane Street Hotel, chosen by them as a convenient center from which to direct the multitudinous activities set up by the adventure of moving. Michael, however, after the first thrills of selection had died down, must be thinking about going up again and be content to look forward on the strength of Stella’s energetic promises to coming down for the Easter vacation and entering 173 Cheyne Walk as his home.

Michael excused himself to himself for not having visited any old friends during this vacation by the business of house-hunting. Alan had been away in Switzerland with his father, but Michael felt rather guilty because he had never been near his old school nor even walked over to Notting Hill to give Viner an account of his first term. It seemed to him more important that he had corresponded with Lonsdale and Wedderburn and Avery than that he should have sought out old friends. All that Christmas vacation he was acutely conscious of the flowing past of old associations and of a sense of transition into a new life that though as yet barren of experience contained the promise of larger and worthier experiences than it now seemed possible to him could have happened in Carlington Road.

“You’re not talking much,” said Prescott.

“I was thinking of old plays,” said Michael.

Really he was thinking of one old play to which his mother had been called away by Prescott on a jolly evening forgotten, whose value to himself had been calculated at half-a-sovereign pressed into his hand. Michael wished that the play could be going to be acted to-night and that for half-a-sovereign he could restore to his mother that jolly evening and that old play and his father. It seemed to him incommunicably sad, so heavily did the Albany with its dead joys rest upon his imagination, that people could not like years be frozen into a perpetual present.

“Don’t often go to the theater nowadays,” said Prescott. “When Saxby was alive”—Michael fancied that “alive” was substituted for something that might have hurt his feelings—“we used to go a lot, but it’s dull going alone.”

“Must you go alone?” asked Michael.

“Oh, no, of course I needn’t. But I seem to be feeling oldish. Oldish,” repeated the host.

“Oh, yes, I think you are very like,” said Prescott. “Good Lord, what a pity, what a pity! Saxby was always a great stickler for law and order, you know. He hated anything that seemed irregular or interfered with things. He hated Radicals, for instance, and motor cars. He had much more brain than many people thought, but of course,” Prescott hurriedly added, as if he wished to banish the slightest hint of professional equipment, “of course he always preferred to be perfectly ordinary.”

“I like to be ordinary,” Michael said; “but I’m not.”

“Never knew anybody at your age who was. I remember I tried to write some poetry about a man who got killed saving a child from being run over by a train,” said Prescott in a tone of wise reminiscence. “You know, I think you’re a very lucky chap,” he added. “Here you are all provided for. In your first term at Oxford. No responsibilities except the ordinary responsibilities of an ordinary gentleman. Got a charming sister. Why, you might do anything.”

“What, for example?” queried Michael.

“Oh, I don’t know. There’s the Diplomatic Service. But don’t be in a hurry. Wait a bit. Have a good time. Your allowance is to be four hundred a year at St. Mary’s. And when you’re twenty-one you come into roughly seven hundred a year of your own, and ultimately you’ll have at least two thousand a year. But don’t be a young ass. You’ve been brought up quietly. You haven’t got to cut a dash. Don’t get in a mess with women, and, if you do, come and tell me before you try to get out of it.”

“I don’t care much about women,” said Michael. “They’re disappointing.”

Michael murmured a dark assent. The glass of champagne that owing to the attention of the soldier-servant was always brimming, the dark discreet room, and the Albany’s atmosphere of passion squeezed into the mold of contemporary decorum or bound up to stand in a row of Thackeray’s books, all combined to affect Michael with the idea that his life had been lived. He felt himself to belong to the period of his host, and as the rubied table glowed upon his vision more intensely, he beheld the old impressionable Michael, the nervous, the self-conscious, the sensitive slim ghost of himself receding out of sight into the gloom. Left behind was the new Michael going up to the Varsity to-morrow morning for his second term, going up with the assurance of finding delightful friends who would confirm his distaste for the circumscribed past. Only a recurrent apprehension that under the table he seemed called upon to manage a number of extra legs, or perhaps it was only a slight uncertainty as to which leg was crossed over the other at the moment, made him wonder very gently whether after all some of this easy remoteness were not due to the champagne. The figure of his host was receding farther and farther every moment, and his conversation reached Michael across a shimmering inestimable space of light, while finally he was aware of his own voice talking very rapidly and with a half-defiant independence of precisely what he wished to say. The evening swam past comfortably, and gradually from the fumes of the cigar smoke the figure of Prescott leaning back in his shadowy armchair took on once again a definite corporeal existence. A clock on the mantelpiece chimed the twelve strokes of midnight in a sort of silvery apology for obtruding the hour. Michael came back into himself with a start of confusion.

Prescott and he walked along the arcade toward Albany Courtyard.

“I say,” said Michael, with his foot on the step of the hansom, “I think I must have talked an awful lot of rot to-night.”

“No, no, no, my dear boy; I’ve been very much interested,” insisted Prescott.

And all the jingling way home Michael tried to rescue from the labyrinth of his memory some definite conversational thread that would lead him to discover what he could have said that might conceivably have mildly entertained his host.

“Nothing,” he finally decided.

Next morning Michael met Alan at Paddington, and they went up to Oxford with all the rich confidence of a term’s maturity. Even in the drizzle of a late January afternoon the city assumed in place of her eternal and waylaying beauty a familiarity that for Michael made her henceforth more beautiful.

After hall Avery came up to Michael’s room, and while the rain dripped endlessly outside, they talked lazily of life with a more clearly assured intimacy than either of them could have contemplated the term before.

Michael spoke of the new house, of his sister Stella, of his dinner with Prescott at the Albany, almost indeed of the circumstances of his birth, so easy did it seem to talk to Avery deep in the deep chair before the blazing fire. He stopped short, however, at his account of the dinner.

“But you wouldn’t be,” Avery objected, “if you thought about it.”

“No, but I shouldn’t think about it,” Michael pointed out. “I should have steeled myself all my life not to think about it, and when your eldest son comes to see me, Maurice, and drinks a little too much champagne and talks as fast as his father used to talk, I shall know just exactly how to make him feel that after all he isn’t quite the silly ass he will be inclined to think himself about the middle of his third cigar.”

Michael sank farther back into the haze of his pipe and, contemplating dreamily the Mona Lisa, made up his mind that she would not become his outlook thirty years hence. Some stern old admiral with his hand on the terrestrial globe and a naval engagement in the background would better suit his mantelpiece.

“I wonder what I shall be like at fifty,” he sighed.

“It depends what you do in between nineteen and fifty,” said Avery. “You can’t possibly settle down at the Albany as soon as you leave the Varsity. You’ll have to do something.”

“What, for example?” Michael asked.

“Oh, write perhaps.”

“Write!” Michael scoffed. “Why, when I can read all these”—he pointed to his bookshelves—“and all the dozens and dozens more I intend to buy, what a fool I should be to waste my time in writing.”

“Well, I intend to write,” said Avery. “In fact, I don’t mind telling you I intend to start a paper as soon as I can.”

Michael laughed.

“And you’ll contribute,” Avery went on eagerly.

“How much?”

“Yes, I expect it will be a looking-glass production,” said Michael. “I should call it The World Turned Upside Down.”

“I’m perfectly serious about this paper,” said Avery reproachfully.

“And I’m taking you very seriously,” said Michael. “That’s why I won’t write a line. Are you going to have illustrations?”

“We might have one drawing. I’m not quite sure how much it costs to reproduce a drawing. But it would be fun to publish some rather advanced stuff.”

“Well, as long as you don’t publish drawings that look as if the compositor had suddenly got angry with the page and thrown asterisks at it, and as long as——”

“Oh, shut up,” interrupted the dreaming editor, “and don’t fall into that tiresome undergraduate cynicism. It’s so young.”

“I think I’ll go round and consult Wedderburn about this paper,” said Avery excitedly.

“He thinks you’re patronizing,” Michael warned him.

Avery pulled up, suddenly hurt:

“Does he? I wonder why.”

“But he won’t, if you ask his advice about reproducing advanced drawings.”

“Doesn’t he like me?” persisted Avery. “I’d better not go round to his rooms.”

“Don’t be foolish, Maurice. Your sensitiveness is really all spoiled vanity.”

Michael was greatly amused when two or three evenings later he strolled round to Wedderburn’s rooms to find him and Maurice Avery sitting in contemplation of about twenty specimen covers of The Oxford Looking-Glass that were pinned against the wall on a piece of old lemon-colored silk. He was greatly amused to find that the reconciling touch of the Muses had united Avery and Wedderburn in a firm friendship—so much amused indeed that he allowed himself to be nominated to serve on the obstetrical committee that was to effect the birth of this undergraduate bantling.

“Though what exactly you want me to do,” protested Michael, “I don’t quite know.”

“We want money, anyway,” Avery frankly admitted. “Oh, and by the way, Michael, I’ve asked Goldney, the Treasurer of the O.U.D.S. to put you up.”

“What on earth for?” gasped Michael.

“Oh, they’ll want supers. They’re doing The Merchant of Venice. Great sport. Wedders is going to join. I want him to play the Prince of Morocco.”

“But are you running the Ouds as well as The Oxford Looking-Glass?” Michael inquired gently.

In the end, however, he was persuaded by Avery to become a member, and not only to join himself but to persuade other St. Mary’s freshmen, including Lonsdale, to join. The preliminary readings and the rehearsals certainly passed away the Lent term very well, for though Michael was not cast for a speaking part, he had the satisfaction of seeing Wedderburn and Avery play respectively the Princes of Morocco and Arragon, and of helping Lonsdale to entertain the professional actresses who came up from London to take part in the production.

Michael was quite relieved when this final lament burst forth. It seemed to set Lonsdale once more securely in the ranks of the amateurs. There had been a dangerous fluency of professional terminology in “my Lorenzo.”

“I’m only a gondolier, an attendant, and a mute judge,” Michael observed.

“And I don’t think that ass from Oriel knows how to play Lorenzo,” Lonsdale went on. “He doesn’t appreciate acting with Miss Delacourt. I wonder if my governor would be very sick if I chucked the Foreign Office and went on the stage. Do you think I could act, if I had a chance? I’m perfectly sure I could act with Miss Delacourt. Don’t forget you’re lunching with me to-morrow. I don’t mind telling you she threw over a lunch with that ass from Oriel who’s playing Lorenzo. I never heard such an idiotic voice in my life.”

Such conversations coupled with requests from Wedderburn and Maurice Avery to hear them their two long speeches seemed to Michael to occupy all his leisure that term. At the same time he enjoyed the rehearsals in the lecture rooms at Christ Church, and he enjoyed escaping sometimes to Alan’s rooms and ultimately persuading Alan to become a gondolier, an attendant and a soldier. Moreover, he met various men from other colleges, and he began to realize faintly thereby the individuality of each college, but most of all perhaps the individuality of his own college, as when Lonsdale came up to him one day with an expression of alarm to say that he had been invited to lunch by the man who played Launcelot Gobbo.

“Well, what of it?” said Michael. “He probably wants to borrow your dog.”

“So he is.”

“Well, I don’t know where Lincoln is. Have you got a map or something of Oxford?”

The performance of The Merchant of Venice took place and was a great success. The annual supper of the club took place, when various old members of theatrical appearance came down and made speeches and told long stories about their triumphs in earlier days. Next morning the auxiliary ladies returned to London, and in the afternoon the disconsolate actors went down to the barges and encouraged their various Toggers to victory.

Lonsdale forgot all about Miss Delacourt when he saw Tommy Grainger almost swinging the St. Mary’s boat into the apprehensive stern of the only boat which stood between them and the headship, and that evening his only lament was that the enemy had on this occasion escaped. The Merchant of Venice with its tights and tinsel and ruffs faded out in that Lenten week of drizzling rain, when every afternoon Michael and Lonsdale and many others ran wildly along the drenched towing-path beside their Togger. And when in the end St. Mary’s failed to catch the boat in front, Michael and Lonsdale and many others felt each in his own way that after all it had been greatly worth while to try.

Michael came down for the Easter vacation with the pleasant excitement of seeing 173 Cheyne Walk furnished and habitable. In deference to his mother’s particular wish he had not invited anybody to stay with him, but he regretted he had not been more insistent when he saw each room in turn nearly twice as delightful as he had pictured it.

“I haven’t done anything but just have it whitewashed,” she said. “I wanted you to choose the scheme, as I’m going to make all the noise.”

The windy March sunlight seemed to fill the great room when Michael and his sister entered it.

“But it’s absolutely empty,” he exclaimed, and indeed there was nothing in all that space except Stella’s piano, looking now almost as small and graceful as in Carlington Road it had seemed ponderous.

“You shall decorate the room,” she said. “What will you choose?”

Michael visualized rapidly for a moment, first a baronial hall with gothic chairs and skins and wrought-iron everywhere, with tapestries and blazonries and heavy gold embroideries. Then he thought of crude and amazing contrasts of barbarous reds and vivid greens and purples, with Persian rugs and a smell of joss-sticks and long low divans. Yet, even as Michael’s fancy decked itself with kaleidoscopic intentions, his mind swiftly returned to the keyboard’s alternations of white and black, so that in a moment exotic splendors were merged in esoteric significance.

“I don’t think we want anything,” he finally proclaimed. “Just two or three tall chairs and a mask of somebody—Beethoven perhaps—and black silk curtains. You see the piano wouldn’t go with elaborate decorations.”

“By Jove, she must have frightfully strong wrists and fingers,” said Alan.

Just so, thought Michael, might a shepherd marvel at a lark’s powerful wings.

Yet with all his distaste for 64 Carlington Road Michael could scarcely check the impulse he had to mount the steps and, knocking at the door, inform whomsoever should open it that he had once lived in this very house. He passed on, however, remembering at every corner of every new street some bygone unimportant event which had once occupied his whole horizon. Involuntarily he walked on and on in a confusion of recollections, until he came to the corner of the road where Lily Haden lived.

It was with a start of self-rebuke that he confessed to himself that here was the ultimate object of his revisitation. He had scarcely thought of Lily since the betrayal of his illusions on that brazen July day when last he had seen her in the garden behind her house. If he had thought of her at all, she had passed through his mind like the memory, or less even than the definite memory, like the consciousness that never is absent of beautiful days spent splendidly in the past. Sometimes during long railway journeys Michael had played with himself the game of vowing to remember an exact moment, some field or effect of clouds which the train was rapidly passing. Yet though he knew that he had done this a hundred times, it was always as impossible to conjure again the vision he had vowed to remember as it had been impossible ever to remember the exact moment of falling asleep.

Down the road a door opened. Michael’s heart jumped annoyingly out of control. It was indeed her door, and whoever was coming out hesitated in the hall. Michael went forward impulsively, but the door slammed, and a man with a pencil behind his ear ran hurriedly down the steps. Michael saw that the windows of the house were covered with the names of house-agents, that several “to let” boards leaned confidentially over the railings to accost passers-by. Michael caught up the man, who was whistling off in the opposite direction, and asked him if he knew where Mrs. Haden had gone.

“I wish I did,” said the man, sucking his teeth importantly. “No, sir, I’m afraid I don’t. Nor anybody else.”

“You mean they went away in a hurry,” said Michael shamefaced.

“Yes, sir.”

“And left no address?”

“Left nothing but a heap of tradesmen’s bills in the hall.”

Michael turned aside, sorry for the ignominious end of the Hadens, but glad somehow that the momentary temptation to renew his friendship with the family, perhaps even his love for Lily, was so irremediably defeated.

“I’m glad you’re not going to start that business again,” she said. “And, Michael, do try not to fall in love for a bit, because I shall soon have such a terrible heap of difficulties that you must solve for me disinterestedly and without prejudice.”

“What sort of difficulties?” Michael demanded, with eyes fixed upon her cheeks warm with the evening light.

YOUTH’S DOMINATION

On May Morning, when the choir boys of St. Mary’s hymned the rising sun, Michael was able for the first time to behold the visible expression of his own mental image of Oxford’s completeness, to pierce in one dazzling moment of realization the cloudy and elusive concepts which had restlessly gathered and resolved themselves in beautiful obscurity about his mind. He was granted on that occasion to hold the city, as it were, imprisoned in a crystal globe, and by the intensity of his evocation to recognize perfectly that uncapturable quintessence of human desire and human vision so supremely displayed through the merely outward glory of its repository.

For Michael the moment of waiting for the first shaft of the sun was scarcely to be endured: the vision of the city below was almost too poignant during the hush of expectancy that preceded the declaration of worship. Then flashed a silver beam in the east: the massed choir boys with one accord opened their mouths and sang just exactly, Michael said to himself, like the morning stars. The rising sun sent ray upon ray lancing over the roofs of the outspread city until with all its spires and towers, with all its domes and houses and still, unpopulous streets it sparkled like the sea. The hymn was sung: the choir boys twittered again like sparrows, and, bowing their greetings to one another, the dons cawed gravely like rooks. The bells incredibly loud here on the tower’s top crashed out so ardently that every stone seemed to nod in time as the tower trembled and swayed backward and forward while the sun mounted into the day.

Michael through all the length of that May day dreamed himself into the heart of England. He had refused Maurice’s invitation to a somewhat mannered breakfast-party at Sandford Lasher, though when he saw the almost defiantly jolly party ride off on bicycles from the lodge, he was inclined to regret his refusal. He wished he had persuaded Alan, now sleeping in the stillness of the House unmoved by May Morning celebrations, to rise early and come with him on some daylong jaunt far afield. It was a little dull to sit down to breakfast in the college shorn of revelers, and for another two hours unlikely to show any sign of life on the part of those who had declined for sleep the excitement of eating dressed crab and playing bridge through the vigil. After breakfast it would still be only about seven o’clock with a hot-eyed languor to anticipate during the rest of the morning. Michael almost decided to go to bed. He turned disconsolately out of the lodge and walked round Cloisters, out through one of the dark entries on to the lawns of New Quad gold-washed in the morning stillness. It seemed incredible that no sign should remain here of that festal life which had so lately thronged the scene. Michael went up to the J.C.R. and ate a much larger breakfast than usual, after which, feeling refreshed, he extracted his bicycle from the shed and at the bidding of a momentary impulse rode out of Oxford toward Lechlade.

Michael thought he would like to stay on to dinner and ride back to Oxford by moonlight. So with dusk falling he sat in the inn garden that was faintly melodious with the plash of the river and perfumed with white stocks. A distant clock chimed the hour, and Michael, turning for one moment to salute the sunset, went into the somber inn parlor.

“I think it’s rather cold by now,” said Michael, unable to keep silence any longer in the presence of this interesting stranger.

“I was trying to alter the last line of a sonnet. If I knew you better, I’d read you the six alternative versions. But if I read them to you now, you’d think I was an affected ass,” he drawled.

Michael protested he would like to hear them very much.

“They’re all equally bad,” the poet proclaimed gloomily. “What made you come to this inn? I didn’t know that anybody else except me had ever been here. You’re at the Varsity, I suppose?”

Michael with a nod announced his college.

“I’m at Balliol. At Balliol you find the youngest dons and the oldest undergraduates in Oxford.”

“I think just the reverse is true of St. Mary’s,” Michael suggested.

“Well, certainly the youngest thing I ever met is a St. Mary’s man. I refer to the ebullient Avery whom I expect you know.”

“Oh, rather. In fact, he’s rather a friend of mine. He’s keen on starting a paper just at present.”

“I know. I know,” said the poet. “He’s asked me to be one of the forty-nine sub-editors. Are you another?”

“Mine’s Hazlewood. It’s rather jolly to meet a person in this inn. Usually I only meet fishermen more flagrantly mendacious than anywhere else. But they’ve got bored with me because I always unhesitatingly go two pounds better than the biggest juggler of avoirdupois present. Have you ever thought of the romance in Troy measure? I can imagine Paris weighing the charms of Helen—no—on second thoughts I’m being forced. Don’t encourage me to talk for effect. How did you come to this inn?”

“I don’t know,” said Michael, wrestling as he spoke with the largest roast chicken he had ever seen. “I think I missed a turning. I’ve been at Lechlade all day.”

“We may as well ride back together,” Hazlewood proposed.

After dinner they talked and smoked for a while in the inn parlor, and then with half-a-moon high in the heavens they scudded back to Oxford. Hazlewood invited Michael to come up to his rooms for a drink.

“Do you know many Balliol people?” he asked.

Michael named a few acquaintances who had been the fruit of his acting in The Merchant of Venice.

“I daresay some of that push will be in my rooms. Other people use my rooms almost more than I do myself. I think they have a vague idea they’re keeping a chapel, or else it’s a relief from the unparagoned brutality of the college architecture.”

Hazlewood was right in his surmise, for when he and Michael reached his rooms, they seemed full of men. It was impossible to say at once how many were present because the only light was given by two gigantic wax candles that stood on either side of the fireplace in massive candlesticks of wrought iron.

“I suppose you know that this is a meeting of the Chandos, Guy?” the chorus sighed, in a climax of exasperated patience.

“Forgot all about it,” said Hazlewood. “But I suppose I can bring a visitor.”

Michael made a move to depart, feeling embarrassed by the implied criticism of the expostulation.

“Sit down,” said Hazlewood peremptorily. “If I can’t bring a visitor I resign from the Society, and the five hundred and fiftieth meeting will have to be held somewhere else. I call upon Lord Comeragh to read us his carefully prepared paper on The Catapult in Mediæval Warfare.”

“Don’t be an affected ass, Guy,” said Comeragh. “You know you yourself are reading a paper on The Sonnet.”

“Rise from the noble lord,” said Hazlewood. “The first I’ve had in a day’s fishing. I say, Fane, don’t listen to this rot.”

The company settled back in anticipation of the paper, while the host and reader searched desperately in the dim light for his manuscript.

Michael came to the conclusion that he liked Balliol, that most unjustly had he heard its atmosphere stigmatized as priggish. He made up his mind to examine more closely at leisure this atmosphere, so that from it he might extract the quintessential spirit. Walking with Hazlewood to the lodge, he asked him if the men he had met in his room would stand as representatives of the college.

“Yes, I should think so,” said Hazlewood. “Why, are you making exhaustive researches into the social aspects of Oxford life? It takes an American to do that really well, you know.”

“But what is the essential Balliol?” Michael demanded.

Michael asked for a little more elaboration.

“Well, take a man connected with the legislative class, directly by birth and indirectly by opportunities, give him at least enough taste not to be ashamed of poetry, give him also enough energy not to be ashamed of football or cricket, and add a profound satisfaction with Oxford in general and Balliol in particular, and there you are.”

“Will that description serve for yourself?” Michael asked.

“For me? Oh, great scott, no! I’m utterly deficient in proconsular ambitions.”

They had reached the lodge by now, and Michael left his new friend after promising very soon to come to lunch and pursue further his acquaintance with Balliol.

When Michael got back to college, Avery was hard at work with Wedderburn drawing up the preliminary circular of The Oxford Looking-Glass. Both the promoters insisted that Michael should listen to their announcement before he told them anything about himself or his day.

“The Oxford Looking-Glass,” Avery began, “is intended to reflect contemporary undergraduate thought.”

“I prefer ‘will reflect,’” Wedderburn interrupted, in bass accents of positive opinion.

“I don’t think it very much matters,” said Michael, “as long as you don’t think that ‘contemporary undergraduate thought’ is too pretentious. The question is whether you can see a ghost in a mirror, for a spectral appearance is just about as near as undergraduate thought ever reaches toward reality.”

Neither Avery nor Wedderburn condescended to reply to his criticism, and the chief promoter went on:

“I think that’s a rotten sentence,” Michael interrupted.

“Well, of course, it will be polished,” Avery irritably explained. “What Wedders and I have been trying to do all the evening is to say as simply and directly as possible what we are aiming at.”

“Ah!” Michael agreed, smiling. “Now I’m beginning to understand.”

“It may be assumed,” Avery went on, “that the opinion of those who are ‘knocking at the door’ (in inverted commas)——”

“I shouldn’t think anybody would ever open to people standing outside a door in inverted commas,” Michael observed.

“Look here, Michael,” Avery and Wedderburn protested simultaneously, “will you shut up, or you won’t be allowed to contribute.”

“Haven’t you ever heard of the younger generation knocking at the door in Ibsen?” fretfully demanded Maurice. “That the opinion of those who are knocking at the door,” he continued defiantly, “is not unworthy of an audience.”

“But if they’re knocking at a door,” Michael objected, “they can’t be reflected in a mirror; unless it’s a glass door, and if it’s a glass door, they oughtn’t to be knocking on it very hard. And if they don’t knock hard, there isn’t much point——”