It was strange to come up to Oxford and to find so many of the chief figures in the college vanished. For a week Michael felt that in a way he had no business still to be there, so unfamiliar was the college itself inhabited by none of his contemporaries save a few Scholars. Very soon, however, the intimacy of the rooms in St. Giles which he shared with Alan cured all regrets, and with a thrill he realized that this last year was going to be of all the years at Oxford the best, indeed perhaps of all the years of his life the best.

College itself gave Michael a sharper sense of its entity than he had ever gathered before. He was still sufficiently a part of it not to feel the implicit criticism of his presence that in a year or two, revisiting Oxford, he would feel; and he was also far enough away from the daily round to perceive and admire the yearly replenishment which preserved its vigor notwithstanding the superficially irreparable losses of each year. There were moments when he regretted 202 High with what now seemed its amazingly irresponsible existence, but 202 High had never given him quite the same zest in returning to it as now 99 St. Giles could give. Nothing had ever quite equaled those damp November dusks, when after a long walk through silent country Michael and Alan came back to the din of Carfax and splashed their way along the crowded and greasy Cornmarket toward St. Giles, those damp November dusks when they would find the tea-things glimmering in the firelight. Buttered toast was eaten; tea was drunk; the second-best pipe of the day was smoked to idle cracklings of The Oxford Review and The Star; a stout landlady cleared away, and during the temporary disturbance Michael pulled back the blinds and watched the darkness and fog slowly blotting out St. John’s and the alley of elm-trees opposite, and giving to the Martyrs’ Memorial and even to Balliol a gothic and significant mystery. The room was quiet again; the lamps and the fire glowed; Michael and Alan, settled in deep chairs, read their History and Philosophy; outside in the November night footsteps went by; carts and wagons occasionally rattled; bells chimed; outside in the November murk present life was manifesting its continuity; here within, the battles and the glories, the thoughts, the theories and the speculations of the past for Michael and Alan moved across printed pages under the rich lamplight.

Dinner dissolved the concentrated spell of two hours. But dinner at 99 St. Giles was very delightful in the sea-green dining-room whose decorations had survived the departing tenant who created them. Michael and Alan did not talk much; indeed, such conversation as took place during the meal came from the landlady. She possessed so deft a capacity for making apparently the most barren observations flower and fruit with intricate narrations, that merely an inquiry as to the merit of the lemon-sole would serve to link the occasion with an intimate revelation of her domestic past.

After dinner Michael and Alan read on toward eleven o’clock, at which hour Alan usually went to bed. It was after his departure that in a way Michael enjoyed the night most. The medieval chronicles were put back on their shelf; Stubbs or Lingard, Froude, Freeman, Guizot, Lavisse or Gregorovius were put back; round the warm and silent room Michael wandered uncertain for a while; and at the end of five minutes down came Don Quixote or Adlington’s Apuleius, or Florio’s Montaigne, or Lucian’s True History. The fire crumbled away to ashes and powder; the fog stole into the room; outside was now nothing but the chimes at their measured intervals, nothing but the noise of them to say a city was there; at that hour Oxford was truly austere, something more indeed than austere, for it was neither in time nor in space, but the abstraction of a city. Only when the lamps began to reek did Michael go up to bed by candlelight. In his vaporous room, through whose open window the sound of two o’clock striking came very coldly, he could scarcely fancy himself in the present. The effort of intense reading, whether of bygone institutions or of past adventure, had left him in the condition of physical freedom that saints achieve by prayer. He was aware of nothing but a desire to stay forever like this, half feverish with the triumph of tremendous concentration, to undress in this stinging acerbity of night air, and to lie wakeful for a long time in this world of dreaming spires.

99 St. Giles exercised just that industrious charm which Michael had anticipated from the situation. The old house overlooked such a wide thoroughfare that the view, while it afforded the repose of movement, scarcely ever aroused a petty inquisitiveness into the actions of the passersby. The traffic of the thoroughfare like the ships of the sea went by merely apprehended, but not observed. The big bay-window hung over the street like the stern-cabin of a frigate, and as Michael sat there he had the impression of being cut off from communication, the sense of perpetually leaving life astern. The door of 99 St. Giles did not open directly on the street, but was reached by a tortuous passage that ran the whole depth of the house. This entrance helped very much the illusion of separation from the ebb and flow of ordinary existence, and was so suggestive of a refuge that involuntarily Michael always hurried through it that the sooner he might set his foot on the steep and twisted staircase inside the house. There was always an excitement in reaching this staircase again, an impulse to run swiftly up, as if this return to the sitting-room was veritably an escape from the world. Here the books sprawled everywhere. At 202 High they had filled the cupboards in orderly fashion. Here they overflowed in dusty cataracts, and tottered upward in crazy escalades and tremulous piles. All the shelves were gorged with books. Moreover, Michael every afternoon bought more books. The landlady held up her hands in dismay as, crunching up the paper in which they had been wrapped, he considered in perplexity their accommodation. More space was necessary, and the sea-green dining-room was awarded shelves. Here every morning after breakfast came the exiles, the dull and the disappointing books which had been banished from the sitting-room. Foot by foot the sea-green walls disappeared behind these shelves. In Lampard’s bookshop Michael was certainly a personality. Lampard himself even came to tea, and sat nodding his approbation.

As for Alan, he used to stay unmoved by the invading volumes. He had stipulated at the beginning that one small bookcase should be reserved for him. Here Plato and Aristotle, Herodotus and Thucydides always had room to breathe, without ever being called upon to endure the contamination of worm-eaten bibliophily.

“Where the deuce has my Stubbs got to?” Michael would grumble, delving into the musty cascade of old plays and chap books which had temporarily obliterated the current literature of the week’s work.

Alan would very serenely take down Plato from his own trim and unimpeded shelves, and his brow would already be knitted with the effort of fixing half-a-dozen abstractions before Michael had decided after a long excavation that Stubbs had somehow vanished in the byways of curious reading.

Yet notwithstanding the amount of time occupied by arranging and buying and finding books, Michael did manage to absorb a good deal of history, even of that history whose human nature has to be sought arduously in charters, exchequer-rolls and acts of parliament. Schools were drawing near; the dates of Kings and Emperors and Popes in their succession adorned the walls of his bedroom, so that even while he was cleaning his teeth one fact could be acquired.

Only on Sunday evenings did Michael allow himself really to reenter the life of St. Mary’s. These Sunday evenings had all the excitement of a long-interrupted reunion. To be sure, Venner’s was thronged with people who seemed to be taking life much too lightly; but Tommy Grainger was there, still engaged with a pass-group. People spoke hopefully of going head this year. Surely with Tommy and three other Blues in the boat, St. Mary’s must go head. The conversation was so familiar that it was almost a shock to find so many of the faces altered. But Cuffe was still there with his mouth perpetually open just as wide as ever. Sterne was still there and likely, so one heard, to make no end of runs next summer. George Appleby was very much in evidence since Lonsdale’s departure. George Appleby was certainly there, and Michael rather liked him and accepted an invitation to lunch. In hall the second-year men were not quite as rowdy as they used to be, and when they were rowdy, somehow to Michael and the rest of the fourth year they seemed to lack the imagination of themselves when they⁠—but after all the only true judges of that were the Princes and Cardinals and Poets staring down from their high golden frames. The dons, too, at High Table might know, for there they sat, immemorial as ever.

Wine in Common Room was just the same, and it really was very jolly to be sitting between Castleton⁠—that very popular President of J.C.R.⁠—and Tommy Grainger. There certainly was a great and grave satisfaction in leading off with a more ceremonious health drinking than had ever been achieved in the three years past. Michael found it amusing to catch the name of some freshman and, shouting abruptly a salute, to behold him wriggle and blush and drink his answer and wonder who on earth was hailing him. Michael often asked himself if it really were possible he could appear to that merry rout at the other end of J.C.R. in truly heroic mold. He supposed, with a smile at himself for so gross a fraud, that he really did for them pass mortal stature and that already he had a bunch of legends dangling from his halo. Down in Venner’s after wine, Michael fancied the shouts of the freshmen wandering round Cloisters were more raucous than once they had seemed. Sometimes really they were almost irritating, but the After was capital, although the new comic song of the new college jester lacked perhaps a little the perfect lilt of “Father says we’re going to beat them.” Yet, after all, the Boer war had been over three years now: no doubt “Father says we’re going to beat them” would have sounded a little stale. Last term, however, at Two Hundred and Two it had rung as fresh as ever. But the singer was gone now. It was meet his song should perish with his withdrawal from the Oxford scene. Still the After was quite good sport, and Michael was glad to think he and Grainger and Sterne were giving the last After but one of this term. He bicycled back to the digs with his head full of chatter, of clinking glasses and catchy tunes. Nevertheless, all consciousness of the evening’s merriment faded out, as he hurried up the crooked staircase to the sitting-room where Alan, upright at the table amid Thucydidean commentaries, was reading under the lamp’s immotionable rays, his hair glinting with what was now rare gold.

During this autumn term neither Michael nor Alan spoke of Stella except as an essentially third person. She was in London, devoting so much of herself so charmingly to her mother that Mrs. Fane nearly abandoned every other interest in her favor. There were five Schumann recitals, of which press notices were sent to 99 St. Giles. Michael as he read them handed them on to Alan.

“Jolly good,” said he, in a tone of such conventional praise that Michael really began to wonder whether he had after all changed his mind instead of merely concealing his intention. However, since conversation between these two had been stripped to the bare bones of intercourse, Michael could not bring himself to violate this habit of reserve for the sake of a curiosity the gratification of which in true friendship should never be demanded, nor even accepted with deeper attention than the trivial news of the day casually offered. Nor would Michael have felt it loyal to Alan to try from Stella to extract a point of view regarding him. Anyway, he reassured himself, nothing could be done at present.

Toward the end of term Mrs. Ross wrote a letter to Michael whose news was sufficiently unexpected to rouse the two of them to a conversation of greater length than any they had had since term began.

Cobble Place,

November 30.

My dear Michael,

You will be surprised to hear that I have become a Catholic, or I suppose I should say to you, if you still adhere to your theories, a Roman Catholic. My reasons for this step, apart of course from the true reason⁠—the grace of God⁠—were, I think, connected a good deal with my boy. When your friend Mr. Prescott killed himself, I felt very much the real emptiness of such a life that on the surface was so admirable, in some ways so enviable. I am dreadfully anxious that Kenneth⁠—he is Kenneth Michael now⁠—I hope you won’t be vexed I should have wished him to have Michael also⁠—well, as I was saying⁠—that Kenneth should grow up with all the help that the experience of the past can give him. It has become increasingly a matter of astonishment to me how so many English boys manage to muddle through the crises of their boyhood without the Sacraments. I’m afraid you’ll be reading this letter in rather a critical spirit, and perhaps resenting my implication that you, for instance, have come through so many crises without the Sacraments. But I’m not yet a good enough theologian to argue with you about the claims of your Church. Latterly I’ve felt positively alarmed by the prospect of grappling with Kenneth’s future. I have seen you struggle through, and I know I can say win a glorious victory over one side of yourself. But I have seen other things happen, even from where I live my secluded life. If my husband had not been killed I might not perhaps have felt this dread on Kenneth’s account. But I like to think that God in giving me that great sorrow has shown His purpose by offering me this new and unimagined peace and security and assurance. I need scarcely say I have had a rather worrying time lately. It is strange how when love and faith are the springs of action one must listen with greater patience than one could listen for any lesser motive to the opinions of other people.

Joan and Mary whom I’ve always thought of as just wrapped up in the good works of their dear good selves, really rose in their wrath and scorched me with the fieriest opposition. I could not have believed they had in them to say as much in all their lives as they said to me when I announced my intention. Nor had I any idea they knew so many English clergymen. I believe that to gratify them I have interviewed half the Anglican ministry. Even a Bishop was invoked to demonstrate my apostacy. Nancy, too, wrote furious letters. She was not outraged so much theologically, but her sense of social fitness was shattered.

My darling old mother was the only person who took my resolve calmly. “As long as you don’t try to convert me,” she said, “and don’t leave incense burning about the house, well⁠—you’re old enough to know your own mind.” She was so amusing while Joan and Mary were marshaling arguments against me. She used to sit playing “Miss Milligan” with a cynical smile, and said, when it was all over and in spite of everyone I had been received, that she had really enjoyed Patience for the first time, as Joan and Mary were too busy to prevent her from cheating.

How are you and dear old Alan getting on? Of course you can read him this letter. I’ve not written to him because I fancy he won’t be very much interested. Forgive me that I did not take you into my confidence beforehand, but I feared a controversy with a real historian about the continuity of the Anglican church.

My love to you both at Oxford.

“Great scott!” Michael exclaimed, as he finished the letter. “Alan! could you ever in your wildest dreams have imagined that Mrs. Ross, the most inveterate Whig and Roundhead and Orange bigot, at least whenever she used to argue with me, would have gone over?”

“What do you mean?” Alan asked, sinking slowly to earth from his Platonic ovpavos. “Gone over where?”

“To Rome⁠—become a Roman Catholic.”

“Who?” gasped Alan, staggered now more than Michael. “Mrs. Ross⁠—Aunt Maud?”

“It’s the most extraordinary thing I ever heard,” said Michael. “She⁠—and Kenneth,” he added rather maliciously, seeing that Alan’s Britannic prejudice was violently aroused. “I’ll read you her letter.”

Plato was shut up for the evening before Michael was halfway through, and almost before the last sentence had been read, Alan’s wrath exploded.

“It’s all very fine for her to laugh like that at Joan and Mary and Nancy,” he said, coloring hotly. “But they were absolutely right, and Mrs. Ross⁠—I mean Aunt Maud⁠—”

“I was afraid you were going to disown the relationship,” Michael laughed.

“Aunt Maud is absolutely wrong. Why, my uncle would have been furious. Even if she became a Catholic she had no business to take Kenneth with her. The more I think of it⁠—you know, it really is a bit thick.”

“Why do you object?” Michael asked curiously. “I never knew you thought about religion at all, except so far as occasionally to escort your mother politely to Matins, and that was after all to oblige her more than God. Besides, you’re reading Greats, and I always thought that the Greats people in their fourth year abstained from anything like a definite opinion for fear of losing their First.”

“I may not have a definite opinion about Christianity,” said Alan. “But Catholicism is ridiculous, anyway⁠—it doesn’t suit English people.”

“There you’re treading on the heels of the School of Modern History which you affect to despise. You really don’t know, if I may say so, what could or could not suit the English people unless you know what has or has not suited them.”

“Why don’t you become a Catholic yourself,” challenged Alan, “if you’re so keen on them?”

“For a logician,” said Michael, “your conclusion is bad, being entirely unrelated to any of our premises. Secondly, were I inclined to label myself as anything, I should be disposed to label myself as a Catholic already.”

“Oh, I know that affectation!” scoffed Alan.

“Well, the net result of our commentary is that you, like everybody else, object to Mrs. Ross changing her opinions, because you don’t like it. Her position is negligible, the springs of action being religious. Now if my mother went over to Rome I should be rather bucked on her account.”

“My dear chap, if you don’t mind my saying so,” suggested Alan as apologetically as his outraged conventionality would allow, “your mother has always been rather given to⁠—er⁠—all sorts of new cults, and it wouldn’t be so⁠—er⁠—noticeable in her case. But supposing Stella⁠—”

Michael looked at him sharply.

“Supposing Stella did?” he asked.

“Oh, of course she’s artistic and she’s traveled and⁠—oh, well, I don’t know⁠—Stella’s different.”

At any rate, thought Michael, he was still in love with Stella. She was evidently beyond criticism.

“You needn’t worry,” said Michael. “I don’t think she ever will.”

“You didn’t think Aunt Maud ever would,” Alan pointed out.

“And, great scott, it’s still absolutely incredible,” Michael murmured.

Although in the face of Alan’s prejudice Michael had felt very strongly that Mrs. Ross had done well by her change of communion, or rather by her submission to a communion, for he never could remember her as perfervid in favor of any before, at the same time to himself he rather regretted the step, since it destroyed for him that idea he had kept of her as one who stood gravely holding the balance. He dreaded a little the effect upon her of a sudden plunge into Catholicism, just as he had felt uneasy when eight or nine years ago Alan had first propounded the theory of his uncle being in love with her. Michael remembered how the suggestion had faintly shocked his conception of Miss Carthew. It was a little disconcerting to have to justify herself to Nancy, or indeed to anyone. It seemed to weaken her status. Moreover, his own deep-implanted notion of “going over to Rome” as the act of a weakling and a weathercock was hard to allay. His own gray image of Pallas Athene seemed now to be decked with meretricious roses. He was curious to know what his mother would think about the news. Mrs. Fane received it as calmly as if he had told her Mrs. Ross had taken up palmistry; to her Catholicism was only one of the numberless fads that made life amusing. As for Stella, she did not comment on the news at all. She was too much occupied with the diversions of the autumn season. Yet Stella was careful to impress on Michael that her new mode of life had not been dictated by any experience in Vienna.

“Don’t think I’m drowning care,” she wrote. “I made a damned fool of myself and luckily you’re almost the only person who knows anything about it. I’ve wiped it out as completely as a composition I’ve learned and played and done with. Really I find this pottering life that mother and I lead very good for my music. I’m managing to store up a reserve of feeling. The Schumann recitals were in some ways my best efforts so far. Just now I’m absolutely mad about dancing and fencing; and as mother’s life is entirely devoted to the theory of physical culture at this exact moment, we’re both happy.”

Michael told Alan what Stella said about dancing and fencing, and he was therefore not surprised when Alan informed him, with the air of one who really has discovered something truly worth while, that there was a Sword club at Oxford.

“Hadn’t you better join as well next term?” he suggested. “Rather good ecker, I fancy.”

“Much better than golf,” said Michael.

“Oh, rather,” Alan agreed, in lofty innocence of any hidden allusion to his resolve of last summer.

For the Christmas vacation Michael went to Scotland, partly because he wanted to brace himself sharply for the last two terms of his Oxford time, but more because he had the luxurious fancy to stay in some town very remote from Oxford, there meditating on her spires like gray and graceful shapes of mist made perdurable forever. Hitherto Oxford had called him back, as to a refuge most severe, from places whose warmth or sensuousness or gaiety was making her cold beauty the more desirable. Now Michael wished to come back for so nearly his ultimate visit as to a tender city of melting outlines. Therefore to fulfill this vision of return he refused Guy Hazlewood’s invitation to Plashers Mead. It seemed to him that no city nearer than Aberdeen would give him the joy of charging southward in the train, back to the moist heart of England and that wan aggregation of immaterial domes and spires.

Aberdeen was spare and harsh enough even for Michael’s mood, and there for nearly five weeks of northeasterly weather he worked at political economy. It was a very profitable vacation; and that superb and frozen city of granite indifferent to the howling North sent him back more ready to combat the perilous dreams which like the swathes of mist destroying with their transmutations the visible fabric of Oxford menaced his action.

Certainly it needed the physical bracing of his sojourn at Aberdeen to keep Michael from dreaming away utterly his last Lent term. February was that year a month of rains from silver skies, of rains that made Oxford melodious with their perpetual trickling. They were rains that lured him forth to dabble in their gentle fountains, to listen at the window of Ninety-nine to their rippling monody, and at night to lie awake infatuated.

Still, even with all the gutterspouts in Oxford jugging like nightingales and with temptation from every book of poetry to abandon history, Michael worked fairly steadily, and when the end of term surprised him in the middle of his industry, he looked back with astonishment at the amount of apposite reading accomplished in what seemed, now so cruelly swift were the hours, a mere week of rain.

He obtained leave to stay up during the Easter vacation, and time might have seemed to stand still, but that Spring on these rathe mornings of wind and scudded blue sky was forward with her traceries, bringing with every morning green Summer visibly nearer. The urgency of departure less than the need for redoubled diligence in acquiring knowledge obsessed Michael all this April. Sitting in the bay-window at Ninety-nine on these luminous eves of Spring, he vexed himself with the thought of disturbing so soon his books, of violating with change the peaceful confusion achieved in two terms. The fancy haunted him that for the length of the Long Vacation 99 St. Giles would drowse under the landlady’s nicknacks brought out to replace his withdrawn treasures; that nothing would keep immortal the memory of him and Alan save their photographs in frames of almost royal ostentation. Vaguely through his mind ran the notion of becoming a don, that forever he might stay here in Oxford, a contemplative intellectual cutoff from the great world. For a week the notion ripened swiftly, and Michael worked very hard in his determination to proceed from a First to the competition for a Fellowship. The notion ripened too swiftly, however, and fell with a plump, fit for nothing, when he suddenly realized he would have to stay on in Oxford alone, since of all his friends he could see not one who would be likely in the academic cloister to accompany his meditations. With a gesture of weary contempt Michael flung Stubbs into the corner, and resolved that, come what might in the History Schools, for what remained of his time at Oxford he would enjoy the proffered anodyne.

After he had disowned his work, he took to wandering rather aimlessly about the streets; but their aspect, still unfrequented as yet by the familiar figures of term-time, made him feel sad. Guy Hazlewood was summoned by telegram from where at Plashers Mead he was presumed to have found abiding peace. He came bicycling in from the Witney road at noon of a blue April day so richly canopied with rolling clouds that the unmatured season took on some of June’s ampler dignity. After lunch they walked to Witham Woods, and Guy tried to persuade Michael to come to Wychford when the summer term was over. He was full of the plan for founding that lay monastery, that cloister for artists who wished between Oxford and the world a space unstressed by anything save ordered meditation. Michael was captured anew by the idea he had first propounded, and they talked gayly of its advantages, foreseeing, if the right people could be induced to come, a period of intense stimulation against a background of serenity. Then Guy began to talk of how day by day he was subduing words to rhyme and meter.

“And you, what would you do?” he asked.

At once Michael realized the futility of their scheme for him.

“I should only dream away another year,” he said rather sadly, “and so if you don’t mind, old chap, I think I won’t join you.”

“Rot!” Guy drawled. “I’ve got it all clear now in my mind. Up at seven. At breakfast we should take it in turns to read aloud great poetry. From eight to ten retire to our cells, and work at a set piece⁠—a sonnet or six lines of prose. Ten to eleven a discussion on what we’d done. Eleven to one work at our own stuff. One o’clock lunch with some reading aloud. All the afternoon to do what we like. Dinner at seven with more reading aloud, and in the evening reading to ourselves. Not a word to be spoken after nine o’clock, and bed at eleven. After tea twice a week we might have academic discussions.”

“It sounds perfect,” said Michael, “if you’re already equipped with the desire to be an artist, and what is more important if deep down in yourself you’re convinced you have the least justification for ambition. But, Guy, what a curious chap you are. You seem to have grown so much younger since you went down.”

Guy laughed on a note of exultation that sounded strange indeed in one whom when still at Balliol Michael had esteemed as perhaps the most perfect contemporary example of the undergraduate tired by the consciousness of his own impeccable attitude. Guy had always possessed so conspicuously that Balliol affectation of despising accentuations of seriousness, of humor, of intention, of friendship, of everything indeed except parlor rowdiness with cushions and sofas, that Michael was almost shocked to hear the elaborately wearied Guy declare boisterously:

“My dear chap, that is the great secret. The moment you go down, you do grow younger.”

He must be in love, thought Michael suddenly; and, so remote was love seeming to him just now, he blushed in the implication by his inner self of having penetrated uninvited the secret of a friend.

Guy talked all teatime of the project, and when they had eaten enough bread and honey, they set out for Oxford by way of Godstow. The generous sun was blanched by watery clouds. A shrewd wind had risen while they sat in the inn, and the primroses looked very wan in the shriveled twilight. Michael had Guy’s company for a week of long walks and snug evenings, but the real intimacy which he had expected would be consummated by this visit never effected itself somehow. Guy was more remote in his mood of communal ambitions than he was at Oxford, living his life of whimsical detachment. After he went back to Plashers Mead, Michael only missed the sound of his voice, and was not conscious of that more violent wrench when the intercourse of silence is broken.

It happened that year St. Mark’s Eve fell upon a Sunday, and Michael, having been reading the poems of Keats nearly all the afternoon, was struck by the coincidence. Oxford on such an occasion was able to provide exactly the same sensation for him as Winchester had given to the poet. Michael sat in his window-seat looking out over the broad thoroughfare of St. Giles, listening to the patter and lisp of Sabbath footfalls, to the burden of the bells; and as he sat there with the city receding in the wake of his window, he was aware more poignantly than ever of how actually in a few weeks it would recede. The bells and the footsteps were quiet for a while: the sun had gone: it was the vesper stillness of evening prayer: slowly the printed page before him faded from recognition. Already the farther corners of the room were black, revealing from time to time, as a tongue of flame leaped up in the grate, the golden blazonries of the books on the walls. It was everywhere dark when the people came out of church, and the footsteps were again audible. Michael envied Keats the power which he had known to preserve forever that St. Mark’s Eve of eighty years ago in Winchester. It was exasperating that now already the footfalls were dying away, that already their sensation was evanescent, that he could not with the wand of poetry forbid time to disturb this quintessential hour of Oxford. Art alone could bewitch the present in the fashion of that enchantress in the old fairy tale who sent long ago a court to sleep.

What was the use of reading history unless the alchemy of literature had transcended the facts by the immortal presentation of them? These charters and acts of parliament, these exchequer-rolls and raked-up records meant nothing. Ivanhoe held more of the Middle Ages than all of Maitland’s fitting and fussing, than all of Stubbs’ ponderous conclusions. The truth of Ivanhoe, the truth of the Ingoldsby Legends, the truth of Christabel was indeed revealed to the human soul through the power of art to unlock for one convincing moment truth with the same directness of divine exposition as faith itself.

Now here was Oxford opening suddenly to him her heart, and he was incapable of preserving the vision. The truth would state itself to him, and as he tried to restate it, lo, it was gone. Perhaps these moments that seemed to demand expression were indeed mystical assurances of human immortality. Perhaps they were not revealed for explanation. After all, when Keats had wrought forever in a beautiful statement the fact of a Sabbath eve, the reader could not restate why he had wrought it forever. Art could do no more than preserve the sense of the fact: it could not resolve it in such a way that life would cease to be the baffling attempt it was on the individual’s part to restate to himself his personal dreams.

Oh, this clutching at the soul by truth, how damnably instantaneous it was, how for one moment it could provoke the illusion of victory over all the muddled facts of existence: how a moment after it could leave the tantalized soul with a despairing sense of having missed by the breadth of a hair the entry into knowledge. By the way, was there not some well-reasoned psychological explanation of this physical condition?

The sensation of St. Mark’s Eve was already fled. Michael forsook the chilling window-seat and went with lighted candle to search for the psychological volume which contained a really rational explanation of what he had been trying to apprehend. He fumbled among his books for a while, but he could not find the one he wanted. Then, going to pull down the blinds, he was aware of Oxford beyond the lamplit thoroughfare, with all her spires and domes invisible in the darkness, the immutable city that neither mist nor modern architects could destroy, the immortal academy whose spirit would surely outdare the menace of these reforming Huns armed with Royal Commissions, and wither the cowardly betrayers of her civilization who, even now before the barbarian was at her gates, were cringing to him with offers to sell the half of her heritage of learning. Michael, aware of Oxford all about him in the darkness, wished he could be a member of Convocation and make a flaming speech in defense of compulsory Greek. That happened to be the proposed surrender to modern conditions which at the moment was agitating his conservative passion.

“Thank heaven I live when I do,” he said to himself. “If it were 2000 AD, how much more miserable I should be.”

He went down to dinner and, propping The Anatomy of Melancholy against the cruet, deplored the twentieth century, but found the chicken rather particularly good.