Michael somehow felt shy when he heard his mother’s voice telling him to come into her room. He had run upstairs and knocked excitedly at her door before the shyness overwhelmed him, but it was too late not to enter, and he sat down to give her the account of his holidays. Rather dull it seemed, and robbed of all vitality by the barrier which both his mother and he hastened to erect between themselves.

“Well, dear, did you enjoy yourself at this Monastery?”

“Oh, rather.”

“Is the⁠—what do you call him?⁠—the head monk a nice man?”

“Oh, yes, awfully decent.”

“And your friend Chator, did he enjoy himself?”

“Oh, rather. Only he had to go before me. Did you enjoy yourself abroad, mother?”

“Very much, dear, thank you. We had lovely weather all the time.”

“We had awfully ripping weather too.”

“Have you got everything ready for school in the morning?”

“There’s nothing much to get. I suppose I’ll go into Cray’s⁠—the Upper Fifth. Do you want me now, mother?”

“No, dear, I have one or two letters to write.”

“I think I’ll go round and see if Chator’s home yet. You don’t mind?”

“Don’t be late for dinner.”

“Oh, no, rather not.”

Going downstairs from his mother’s room, Michael had half an impulse to turn back and confide in her the real account of his holidays. But on reflection he protested to himself that his mother looked upon him as immaculate, and he felt unwilling to disturb by such a revolutionary step the approved tranquillities of maternal ignorance.

Mr. Cray, his new form-master, was a man of distinct personality, and possessed a considerable amount of educative ability; but unfortunately for Michael the zest of classics had withered in his heart after his disappointment over the Oxford and Cambridge Certificate. Therefore Mr. Cray with his bright archæology and chatty scholarship bored Michael more profoundly than any of his masters so far had bored him. Mr. Cray resented this attitude very bitterly, being used to keenness in his form, and Michael’s dreary indolence, which often came nearer to insolence, irritated him. As for the plodding, inky sycophants who fawned upon Mr. Cray’s informativeness, Michael regarded them with horror and contempt. He sat surrounded by the butts and bugbears of his school-life. All the boys whose existence he had deplored seemed to have clambered arduously into the Upper Fifth just to enrage him with the sight of their industrious propinquity. There they sat with their scraggy wrists protruding from shrinking coat-sleeves, with ambitious noses glued to their books, with pens and pencils neatly disposed for demonstrative annotation, and nearly all of them conscious of having figured in the school-list with the printed bubble of the Oxford and Cambridge Higher Certificate beside their names. Contemplating them in the mass, Michael scarcely knew how he would endure another dusty year of school.

“And now we come to the question of the Homeric gate⁠—the Homeric gate, Fane, when you can condescend to our level,” said Mr. Cray severely.

“I’m listening, sir,” said Michael wearily.

“Of course the earliest type of gate was without hinges⁠—without hinges, Fane! Very much like your attention, Fane!”

Several sycophants giggled at this, and Michael, gazing very earnestly at Mr. Cray’s benign but somewhat dirty bald head, took a bloody revenge upon those in reach of his javelin of quadruple penholders.

“For Monday,” said Mr. Cray, when he had done with listening to the intelligent advice of his favourite pupils on the subject of gates ancient and modern, “for Monday the essay will be on Patriotism.”

Michael groaned audibly.

“Isn’t there an alternative subject, sir?” he gloomily enquired.

“Does Fane dislike abstractions?” said Mr. Cray. “Curious! Well, if Fane wishes for an alternative subject, of course Fane must be obeyed. The alternative subject will be An Examination into the Fundamental Doctrines of Hegelian Idealism. Does that suit Fane?”

“Very well indeed,” said Michael, who had never heard of Hegel until that moment, but vowed to himself that somehow between this muggy Friday afternoon and next Monday morning he would conquer the fellow’s opinions. As a matter of fact, the essay proved perfectly easy with the assistance of The Popular Encyclopedia, though Mr. Cray called it a piece of impudence and looked almost baleful when Michael showed it up.

From this atmosphere of complacent effort Michael withdrew one afternoon to consult Father Viner about his future. Underneath the desire for practical advice was a desire to talk about himself, and Michael was disappointed on arriving at Father Viner’s rooms to hear that he was out. However, learning that there was a prospect of his speedy return, he came in at the landlady’s suggestion to amuse himself with a book while he waited.

Wandering round the big bay-windowed room with its odour of tobacco and books, and casting a careless glance at Father Viner’s desk, Michael caught sight of his own name in the middle of a neatly written letter on the top of a pile of others. He could not resist taking a longer glance to see the address and verify the allusion to himself, and with this longer glance curiosity conquered so completely the prejudice against prying into other people’s correspondence that Michael, breathing nervously under the dread of interruption, took up the letter and read it right through. It was in his present mood of anxiety about himself very absorbing.

Clere Abbey,

Michael Mass.

Pax

Dear Brother,

I have been intending to write to you about young Michael Fane ever since he left us, and your letter of enquiry has had the effect of bringing me up to the point.

I hardly know what to tell you. He’s a curious youth, very lovable, and with enough brains to make one wish that he might have a vocation for the priesthood. At the same time I noticed while he was with us, especially after the admirable Chator departed, an overwhelming languor which I very much deplored.

He spent much of his time with a very bad hat indeed, whom I have just sent away from Clere. If you ever come across Mr. Henry Meats, be careful of him. Arbuthnot of St. Aidan’s, Holloway, sent him to me. You know Arbuthnot’s expansive (and for his friends expensive) Christianity. This last effort of his was a snorter, a soft, nasty, hysterical, little blob of vice. I ought to have seen through the fellow before I did. Heaven knows I get enough of the tag-rag of the Movement trying to be taken on at Clere. I suppose the monastic life will always make an imperishable appeal to the worst, and, thank God, some of the best. I mention this fellow to you because I’m afraid he and Michael may meet again, and I don’t at all like the idea of their acquaintanceship progressing, especially as it was unluckily begun beneath a religious roof. So keep an eye on Mr. Henry Meats. He’s really bad.

Another fellow I don’t recommend for Michael is Percy Garrod. Not that I think there is much danger in that direction, for I fancy Michael was very cold with him. Percy is a decent, honest, hardworking, common ass, with a deep respect for the Pope and the Polytechnic. He’s a trifle zealous, however, with bastard information about physical science, and not at all the person I should choose to lecture Michael on the complications of adolescence.

We are getting on fairly well at Clere, but it’s hard work trying to make this country believe there is the slightest necessity for the contemplative life. I hope all goes well with you and your work.

Michael put this letter back where he had found it, and wondered how much of the contents would be discussed by Father Viner. He was glad that Brother Aloysius had vanished, because Brother Aloysius had become like a bad dream with which he was unwilling in the future to renew acquaintance. On his own character Dom Cuthbert had not succeeded in throwing very much light⁠—at any rate not in this letter. Father Viner came in to interrupt Michael’s meditations, and began at once to discuss the letter.

“The Lord Abbot of Clere thinks you’re a dreamer,” he began abruptly.

“Does he, Mr. Viner?” echoed Michael, who somehow could never bring himself to the point of addressing the priest as “Father.” Shyness always overcame his will.

“What do you dream about, young Joseph?”

“Oh, I only think about a good many things, and wonder what I’m going to be and all that,” Michael replied. “I don’t want to go into the Indian Civil Service or anything with exams. I’m sick of exams. What I most want to do is to get away from school. I’m sick of school, and the fellows in the Upper Fifth are a greasy crowd of swats always sucking up to Cray.”

“And who is the gentleman with the crustacean name that attracts these barnacles?”

“Cray? Oh, he’s my form-master, and tries to be funny.”

“So do I, Michael,” confessed Mr. Viner.

“Oh, well, that’s different. I’m not bound to listen to you, if I don’t want to. But I have to listen to Cray for eighteen hours every week, and he hates me because I won’t take notes for his beastly essays. I think I’ll ask my mater if I can’t leave school after this term.”

“And then what would you do?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I could settle when I’d left.”

“What about Oxford?”

“Well, I could go to Oxford later on.”

“I don’t think you could quite so easily as you think. Anyway, you’d much better go to Oxford straight from school.”

“Eight more terms before I leave. Phew!” Michael groaned. “It’s such a terrible waste of time, and I know Oxford’s ripping.”

“Perhaps something will come along to interest you. And always, dear boy, don’t forget you have your religion.”

“Yes, I know,” said Michael. “But at the Abbey I met some people who were supposed to be religious, and they were pretty good rotters.”

The priest looked at him and seemed inclined to let Michael elaborate this topic, but almost immediately he dismissed it with a commonplace.

“Oh, well,” Michael sighed, “I suppose something will happen soon to buck me up. I hope so. Perhaps the Kensitites will start making rows in churches again,” he went on hopefully. “Will you lend me the Apocryphal Gospels? We’re going to have a discussion about them at the De Rebus Ecclesiasticis.”

“Oh, the society hasn’t broken up?” enquired Mr. Viner.

“Rather not. Only everybody’s changed rather. Chator’s become frightfully Roman. He was Sarum last term, and he thinks I’m frightfully heretical, only of course I say a lot I don’t mean just to rag him. I say, by the way, who wrote ‘In a Garden’?”

“It sounds a very general title,” commented Mr. Viner, with a smile.

“Well, it’s some poem or other.”

“Swinburne wrote a poem in the Second Series of Poems and Ballads called ‘A Forsaken Garden.’ Is that what you mean?”

“Perhaps. Is it a famous poem?”

“Yes, I should say it was distinctly.”

“Well, that must be it. Cray tried to be funny about it today in form, and said to me, ‘Good heavens, haven’t you read “In a Garden”?’ And I said I’d never heard of it. And then he said in his funny way to the class, ‘I suppose you’ve all read it.’ And none of them had, which made him look rather an ass. So he said we’d better read it by next week.”

“I can lend you my Swinburne. Only take care of it,” said Mr. Viner. “It’s a wonderful poem.”

In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,
At the sea-down’s edge between windward and lee,
Walled round with rocks as an inland island,
The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.

“I say,” exclaimed Michael eagerly, “I never knew Swinburne was a really great poet. And fancy, he’s alive now.”

“Alive, and living at Putney,” said Mr. Viner.

“And yet he wrote what you’ve just said!”

“He wrote that, and many other things too. He wrote:

Before the beginning of years
There came to the making of man
Time, with a gift of tears;
Grief, with a glass that ran;
Pleasure, with pain for leaven,
Summer, with flowers that fell;
Remembrance fallen from heaven,
And madness risen from hell.”

“Good Lord!” sighed Michael. “And he’s in Putney at this very moment.”

Michael went home clasping close the black volume, and in his room that night, while the gas jet flamed excitably in defiance of rule, he read almost right through the Second Series of Poems and Ballads. It was midnight when he turned down the gas and sank feverishly into bed. For a long while he was saying to himself isolated lines: “The wet skies harden, the gates are barred on the summer side.” “The rose-red acacia that mocks the rose.” “Sleep, and if life was bitter to thee, brother.” “For whom all winds are quiet as the sun, all waters as the shore.”

In school on Monday morning Mr. Cray, to Michael’s regret, did not allude to the command that his class should read “In a Garden.” Michael was desperately anxious at once to tell him how much he had loved the poem and to remind him of the real title, “A Forsaken Garden.” At last he could bear it no longer and went up flushed with enthusiasm to Mr. Cray’s desk, nominally to enquire into an alleged mistake in his Latin Prose, but actually to inform Mr. Cray of his delight in Swinburne. When the grammatical blunder had been discussed, Michael said with as much nonchalance as he could assume:

“I read that poem, sir. I think it’s ripping.”

“What poem?” repeated Mr. Cray vaguely. “Oh, yes, Enoch Arden.”

“Enoch Arden,” stammered Michael. “I thought you said ‘In a Garden.’ I read ‘A Forsaken Garden’ by Swinburne.”

Mr. Cray put on his most patronizing manner.

“My poor Fane, have you never heard of Enoch Arden? Perhaps you’ve never even heard of Tennyson?”

“But Swinburne’s good, isn’t he, sir?”

“Swinburne is very well,” said Mr. Cray. “Oh, yes, Swinburne will do, if you like rose-jam. But I don’t recommend Swinburne for you, Fane.”

Then Mr. Cray addressed his class:

“Did you all read Enoch Arden?”

“Yes, sir,” twittered the Upper Fifth.

“Fane, however, with that independence of judgment which distinguishes his Latin Prose from, let us say, the prose of Cicero, preferred to read ‘A Forsaken Garden’ by one Swinburne.”

The Upper Fifth giggled dutifully.

“Perhaps Fane will recite to us his discovery,” said Mr. Cray, scratching his scurfy head with the gnawed end of a penholder.

Michael blushed resentfully, and walked back to his desk.

“No?” said Mr. Cray with an affectation of great surprise.

Then he and the Upper Fifth, contented with their superiority, began to chew and rend some tough Greek particles which ultimately became digestible enough to be assimilated by the Upper Fifth; while Mr. Cray himself purred over his cubs, looking not very unlike a mangy old lioness.

“Eight more terms,” groaned Michael to himself.

Mr. Cray was not so blind to his pupils’ need for mild intellectual excitement, however much he might scorn the easy emotions of Swinburne. He really grew lyrical over Homeric difficulties, and even spoke enthusiastically of Mr. Mackail’s translation of the Georgics; but always he managed to conceal the nobility of his theme beneath a mass of what he called “minor points.” He would create his own rubbish heap and invite the Upper Fifth to scratch in it for pearls. One day a question arose as to the exact meaning of οὑλοχὑται in Homer. Michael would have been perfectly content to believe that it meant “whole barleycorns,” until Mr. Cray suggested that it might be equivalent to the Latin mola, meaning “grain coarsely ground.” An exhausting discussion followed, illustrated by examples from every sort of writer, all of which had to be taken down in notes in anticipation of a still more exhausting essay on the subject.

“The meal may be trite,” said Mr. Cray, “but not the subject,” he added, chuckling. “However, I have only touched the fringe of it: you will find the arguments fully set forth in Buttmann’s Lexilogus. Who possesses that invaluable work?”

Nobody in the Upper Fifth possessed it, but all anxiously made a note of it, in order to acquire it over the counter of the Book Room downstairs.

“No use,” said Mr. Cray. “Buttmann’s Lexilogus is now out of print.”

Michael pricked up at this. The phrase leant a curious flavour of Romance to the dull book.

“No doubt, however, you will be able to obtain it secondhand,” added Mr. Cray.

The notion of tracking down Buttmann’s Lexilogus possessed the Upper Fifth. Eagerly after school the diligent ones discussed ways and means. Parties were formed, almost one might say expeditions, to rescue the valuable work from oblivion. Michael stood contemptuously aside from the buzz of self-conscious effort round him, although he had made up his own mind to be one of the first to obtain the book. Levy, however, secured the first copy for fourpence in Farringdon Street, earning for his sharpness much praise. Another boy bought one for three shillings and sixpence in Paddington, the price one would expect to pay, if not a Levy; and there were rumours of a copy in Kensington High Street. To Michael the mart of London from earliest youth had been Hammersmith Broadway, and thither he hurried, hopeful of discovering Buttmann’s dingy Lexilogus, for the purchase of which he had thoughtfully begged a sovereign from his mother. Michael did not greatly covet Buttmann, but he was sure that the surplus from three shillings and sixpence, possibly even from fourpence, would be very welcome.

He found at last in a turning off Hammersmith Broadway a wonderful bookshop, whose rooms upon rooms leading into one another were all lined and loaded with every kind of book. The proprietor soon found a copy of Buttmann, which he sold to Michael for half a crown, leaving him with fifteen shillings for himself, since he decided that it would be as well to return his mother at least half a crown from her sovereign. The purchase completed, Michael began to wander round the shop, taking down a book here, a book there, dipping into them from the top of a ladder, sniffing them, clapping their covers together to drive away the dust, and altogether thoroughly enjoying himself, while the daylight slowly faded and streetlamps came winking into ken outside. At last, just as the shop-boy was putting up the shutters, Michael discovered a volume bound in half-morocco of a crude gay blue, that proved on inspection to contain the complete poetical works of Algernon Charles Swinburne, for the sum of seventeen shillings and sixpence.

What was now left of his golden sovereign that should have bought so much beside Buttmann’s brown and musty Lexilogus?

Michael approached the proprietor with the volume in his hand.

“How much?” he asked, with a queer choking sensation, a throbbing excitement, for he had never before even imagined the expenditure of seventeen shillings and sixpence on one book.

“What’s this?” said the proprietor, putting on his spectacles. “Oh, yes, Swinburne⁠—pirated American edition. Seventeen shillings and sixpence.”

“Couldn’t you take less?” asked Michael, with a vague hope that he might rescue a shilling for his mother, if not for cigarettes.

“Take less?” repeated the bookseller. “Good gracious, young man, do you know what you’d have to pay for Swinburne’s stuff separate? Something like seven or eight pounds, and then they’d be all in different volumes. Whereas here you’ve got⁠—lemme see⁠—Atalanta in Calydon, Chastelard, Poems and Ballads, Songs Before Sunrise, Bothwell, Tristram of Lyonesse, Songs of Two Nations, and heaven knows what not. I call seventeen shillings and sixpence very cheap for what you might almost call a man’s lifework. Shall I wrap it up?”

“Yes, please,” said Michael, gasping with the effect of the plunge.

But when that night he read

Swallow, my sister, O fair swift swallow,

he forgot all about the cost.

The more of Swinburne that Michael read, the more impatient he grew of school. The boredom of Mr. Cray’s class became stupendous; and Michael, searching for some way to avoid it, decided to give up Classics and apply for admission to the History Sixth, which was a small association of boys who had drifted into this appendix for the purpose of defeating the ordinary rules of promotion. For instance, when the Captain of the School Eleven had not attained the privileged Sixth, he was often allowed to enter the History Sixth, in order that he might achieve the intellectual dignity which consorted with his athletic prowess.

Michael had for some time envied the leisure of the History Sixth, with its general air of slackness and its form-master, Mr. Kirkham, who, on account of holding many administrative positions important to the athletic life of the school, was so often absent from his classroom. He now racked his brains for an excuse to achieve the idle bliss of these charmed few. Finally he persuaded his mother to write to the Headmaster and apply for his admission, on the grounds of the greater utility of History in his future profession.

“But what are you going to be, Michael?” asked his mother.

“I don’t know, but you can say I’m going to be a barrister or something.”

“Is History better for a barrister?”

“I don’t know, but you can easily say you think it is.”

In the end his mother wrote to Dr. Brownjohn, and one grey November afternoon the Headmaster sailed into the classroom of the Upper Fifth, extricated Michael with a roar, and marched with him up and down the dusky corridor in a ferocious discussion of the proposal.

“Why do you want to give up your Classics?” bellowed Dr. Brownjohn.

In the echoing corridor Michael’s voice sounded painfully weak against his monitor’s.

“I don’t want to give them up, sir. Only I would like to learn History as well,” he explained.

“What’s the good of History?” roared the Doctor.

“I thought I’d like to learn it,” said Michael.

“You shouldn’t think, you infamous young sluggard.”

“And I could go on reading Classics, sir, I could really.”

“Bah!” shouted Dr. Brownjohn. “Impudent nonsense, you young sloth. Why didn’t you get your Certificate?”

“I failed in Arithmetic, sir.”

“You’ll fail in your whole life, boy,” prophesied Dr. Brownjohn in bull-deep accents of reproach. “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”

“No, sir,” said Michael. “I don’t think I am, because I worked jolly hard.”

“Worked, you abominable little loafer? You’ve never worked in your life. You could be the finest scholar in the school, and you’re merely a coruscation of slatternly, slipshod paste. Bah! What do you expect to do when you leave school? Um?”

“I want to go to Oxford.”

“Then get the Balliol Scholarship.”

“I don’t want to be at Balliol,” said Michael.

“Then get the major scholarship at Trinity, Cambridge.”

“I don’t intend to go to Cambridge,” said Michael.

“Good heavens, boy,” roared Dr. Brownjohn, “are you trying to arrange your own career?”

“No, sir,” said Michael. “But I want to go to St. Mary’s, Oxford.”

“Then get a scholarship at St. Mary’s.”

“But I don’t want to be a Scholar of any college. I want to go up as a Commoner.”

The veins on Dr. Brownjohn’s forehead swelled with wrath, astonishment and dismay.

“Get out of my sight,” he thundered. “Get back into your classroom. I’ve done with you; I take no more interest in you. You’re here to earn glory for your school, you’re here to gain a scholarship, not to air your own opinions. Get out of my sight, you young scoundrel. How dare you argue with me? You shan’t go into the History Sixth! You shall stew in your own obstinate juice in the Upper Fifth until I choose to move you out of it. Do you hear? Go back into your classroom. I’ll write to your mother. She’s an idiotic woman, and you’re a slovenly, idle, good-for-nothing cub.”

Overwhelmed with failure and very sensitive to the inquisitive glances of his classmates, Michael sat down in his own desk again as unobtrusively as he could.

Michael’s peace of mind was not increased by the consciousness of Mr. Cray’s knowledge of his appeal to withdraw from the Upper Fifth, and he became exposed to a large amount of sarcasm in allusion to his expressed inclination towards history. He was continually referred to as an authority on Constitutions; he was invited to bring forward comparisons from more modern times to help the elucidation of the Syracusan expedition or the Delian Confederacy.

All that Michael gained from Mr. Cray was a passion for secondhand books⁠—the latest and most fervid of all his collecting hobbies.

One wintry evening in Elson’s Bookshop at Hammersmith he was enjoying himself on the top of a ladder, when he became aware of an interested gaze directed at himself over the dull-gilt edges of a large and expensive work on Greek sculpture. The face that so regarded him was at once fascinating and repulsive. The glittering blue eyes full of laughter were immediately attractive, but something in the pointed ears and curled-back lips, something in the peculiarly white fingers faintly pencilled about the knuckles with fine black hairs, and after a moment something cruel in the bright blue eyes themselves restrained him from an answering smile.

“What is the book, Hyacinthus?” asked the stranger, and his voice was so winning and so melodious in the shadowy bookshop that Michael immediately fell into the easiest of conversations.

“Fond of books?” asked the stranger. “Oh, by the way, my name is Wilmot, Arthur Wilmot.”

Something in Wilmot’s manner made Michael suppose that he ought to be familiar with the name, and he tried to recall it.

“What’s your name?” the stranger went on.

Michael told his name, and also his school, and before very long a good deal about himself.

“I live near you,” said Mr. Wilmot. “We’ll walk along presently. I’d like you to dine with me one night soon. When?”

“Oh, any time,” said Michael, trying to speak as if invitations to dinner occurred to him three or four times a day.

“Here’s my card,” said the stranger. “You’d better show it to your mother⁠—so that she’ll know it’s all right. I’m a writer, you know.”

“Oh, yes,” Michael vaguely agreed.

“I don’t suppose you’ve seen any of my stuff. I don’t publish much. Sometimes I read my poems to Interior people.”

Michael looked puzzled.

“Interior is my name for the people who understand. So few do. I should say you’d be sympathetic. You look sympathetic. You remind me of those exquisite boys who in scarlet hose run delicately with beakers of wine or stand in groups about the corners of old Florentine pictures.”

Michael tried to look severe, and yet, after the Upper Fifth, even so direct and embarrassing a compliment was slightly pleasant.

“Shall we go along? Tonight the Hammersmith Road is full of mystery. But, first, shall I not buy you a book⁠—some exquisite book full of strange perfumes and passionate courtly gestures? And so you are at school? How wonderful to be at school! How Sicilian! Strange youth, you should have been sung by Theocritus, or, better, been crowned with myrtle by some wonderful unknown Greek, some perfect blossom of the Anthology.”

Michael laughed rather foolishly. There seemed nothing else to do.

“Won’t you smoke? These Chian cigarettes in their diaphanous paper of mildest mauve would suit your oddly remote, your curiously shy glance. You had better not smoke so near to the savage confines of St. James’ School? How ascetic! How stringent! What book shall I buy for you, O greatly to be envied dreamer of Sicilian dreams? Shall I buy you Mademoiselle de Maupin, so that all her rococo soul may dance with gilded limbs across your vision? Or shall I buy you À Rebours, and teach you to live? And yet I think neither would suit you perfectly. So here is a volume of Pater⁠—Imaginary Portraits. You will like to read of Denys l’Auxerrois. One day I myself will write an imaginary portrait of you, wherein your secret, sidelong smile will reveal to the world the whole art of youth.”

“But really⁠—thanks very much,” stammered Michael, who was beginning to suspect the stranger of madness⁠—“it’s awfully kind of you, but, really, I think I’d rather not.”

“Do not be proud,” said Mr. Wilmot. “Pride is for the pure in heart, and you are surely not pure in heart. Or are you? Are you indeed like one of those wonderful white statues of antiquity, unaware of the soul with all its maladies?”

In the end, so urgent was Mr. Wilmot, Michael accepted the volume of Pater, and walked with the stranger through the foggy night. Somehow the conversation was so destructive of all experience that, as Michael and his new friend went by the school-gates and perceived beyond the vast bulk of St. James’ looming, Michael felt himself a stranger to it all, as if he never again would with a crowd of companions surge out from afternoon school. The stranger came as far as the corner of Carlington Road with Michael.

“I will write to your mother and ask her to let you dine with me one night next week. You interest me so much.”

Mr. Wilmot waved a pontifical goodbye and vanished in the direction of Kensington.

At home Michael told his mother of the adventure. She looked a little doubtful at his account of Mr. Wilmot.

“Oh, he’s all right, really, Mother. Only, you know, a little peculiar. But then he’s a poet.”

Next day came a letter from Mr. Wilmot.

205 Edwardes Square, W.

November.

Dear Mrs. Fane,

I must apologize for inviting your son to dinner so unceremoniously. But he made a great appeal to me, sitting on the top of a ladder in Elson’s Bookshop. I have a library, in which he may enjoy himself whenever he likes. Meanwhile, may he come to dinner with me on Friday next? Mr. Johnstone, the Member for West Kensington, is coming with his nephew who may be dull without Michael. Michael tells me he thinks of becoming an ecclesiastical lawyer. In that case Johnstone will be particularly useful, and can give him some hints. He’s a personal friend of old Dr. Brownjohn. With many apologies for my “impertinence,”

“This is a perfectly sensible letter,” said Mrs. Fane.

“Perhaps I thought he was funnier than he really was. Does he say anything else except about me sitting on the top of a ladder?”

Somehow Michael was disappointed to hear that this was all.