LIMITATIONS.

“Is it,” he asked, "because of the little tiny spark of the Divine which men have within them that we care for them, or because they are human not divine, limited not immeasurable, faulty not perfect?”

And the Professor of Ignorance, as usual, sat silent, wishing to hear what the others had to say about it, rather than to speak himself.

The Professor of Ignorance.”

Limitations.

A NOVEL.
BY
E. F. BENSON,
AUTHOR OF “DODO,” ETC.
THIRD EDITION.
LONDON:
A. D. INNES & CO.,
BEDFORD STREET.
1896.

LIMITATIONS.

CHAPTER I.

Tom Carlingford was sitting at his piano, in his rooms at King’s College, Cambridge, playing the overture to Lohengrin with the most indifferent success. It was a hot night in the middle of August, and he was dressed suitably, if not elegantly, in a canvas shirt, a pair of flannel trousers, and socks. He had no tie on, and he was smoking a meerschaum bowl of peculiarly spotted appearance, through a long cherry-wood stem. The remains of a nondescript meal laid coldly on the table, and a cricket-bag on the hearth-rug, seemed to indicate that he had been away playing cricket, and had got back too late for hall. The piano was almost as disreputable in appearance as its master, for it stood in a thorough draught, between the windows opening on to the front lawn and the door opening into the smaller sitting-room, and the guttering candle was making a fine stalactite formation of wax on D in alt. Several good pictures and college photographs hung on the walls, and between the windows stood a small bookcase, suspiciously tidy. Tom played with the loud pedal down, and treated his hands in the way in which we are told we should bestow our alms. D in alt had stuck fast to C sharp and C, and the effect, when either of these three notes was played, was extremely curious. However, he finished the overture after a fashion, and got up.

“This is a red-letter day for Wagner,” he remarked. “What do you do with pipes when they get leprous, Teddy?” he asked, looking dubiously at the meerschaum bowl.

“I sit down and do Herodotus,” remarked a slightly irritated voice from the window-seat, behind the lamp.

“I don’t think that’s any use,” said Tom.

“Perhaps you’ve never tried it. I wish to goodness you’d sit quiet for ten minutes, and let me work!”

Tom walked up to the lamp, and examined the pipe more closely.

“It is as spotted and ringstraked as Jacob’s oxen,” he remarked. “Teddy, do stop working! It’s after eleven, and you said you’d stop at eleven.”

“And if you inquire what the reason for——” murmured Teddy.

“I never inquired the reason,” interrupted Tom. “I don’t want to know. Do stop! You’re awfully unsociable!”

“Five minutes more,” said Ted inexorably.

Tom took a turn up and down the room, and whistled a few bars of a popular tune. Then he took up a book, yawned prodigiously, and read for the space of a minute and a quarter, lying back in a long basket-chair.

“What the use of my learning classics is, I don’t know,” he remarked. “I’m not going to be a schoolmaster or a frowsy don.”

“No, we can’t all be schoolmasters or frowsy dons, any more than we can all be sculptors,” said the voice from the window-seat vindictively.

Tom laughed.

“Dear old boy, I mean no reflection on you. You’ll be a capital don, if you succeed in getting a fellowship, and it will always be a consolation to you to know that you probably won’t be as frowsy as some of your colleagues. I can’t think how you can possibly contemplate teaching Latin prose to a lot of silly oafs like me for the remainder of your mortal life.”

“You must remember that all undergraduates aren’t such fools as you.”

“That’s quite true; but some are much more unpleasant. They are, really; it’s no use denying it.”

Ted shut his books, and looked meditatively out on to the court through the intervening flower-box, filling his pipe the while, and Tom, finding he got no answer, continued—

“And I suppose, in course of time, they’ll make you a dean. That’s a jolly occupation! Eight a.m. on a winter’s morning. And the warming apparatus of the chapel is defective. Furthermore, you must remember that those are the dizzy heights to which you will rise, if you are successful; if not, you will have spent the six best years of your life in writing about the deliberative subjunctive, and, at the end, have the consolation of being told that the electors considered your dissertation very promising, but unfortunately there was no vacancy for you. They will also recommend you to publish it, and it will be cut up in the Classical Review, by a Dead Sea ape with bleary eyes and a bald head, who will say you are an ignoramus, and had better read his grammar before you write one of your own. Oh, it’s a sweet prospect! It is grammar you do, isn’t it?”

“No; but it doesn’t matter,” said Ted. “Go on.”

“How a sensible man can contemplate spending his life in a place like this, I cannot conceive,” said Tom. “It’s the duty of every man to knock about a bit, and learn that the outer darkness does not begin at Cambridge Station. There is a place called London, and there are other places called Europe, Asia, Africa, and America.”

“And Australia. Do you propose to go to them all?” asked Ted. “It’s a new idea, isn’t it? Yesterday you said that, as soon as you went down, you were going to bury yourself at home for five years, and work. Why is Applethorpe so much better than Cambridge?”

“Why?” said Tom. “The difference lies in me. I shall continue to be aware of the existence of other countries, and other interests. Great heavens! I asked Marshall to-day, in an unreflective moment, if he knew Thomas Hardy, and he said, ‘No; when did he come up?’ And Marshall is a successful, valuable man, according to their lights here. He’s a tutor, and he collects postmarks. That’s what you may become some day. My hat, what a brute you will be!”

Ted Markham left the window-seat, and came and stood on the hearth-rug.

“You don’t understand,” he said. “It’s not necessary to vegetate because you live here, and it’s not necessary to be unaware of the existence of Hardy because you know Thucydides. I don’t want fame in the way you want it in the least. I haven’t the least desire to make a splash, as you call it. It seems to me that one can become educated, in your sense of the word, simply by living and seeing people. It doesn’t really help you to live in a big town, and have five hundred acquaintances instead of fifty.”

“No, I know,” said Tom, “but as a matter of experience, of men who settle down here, a larger proportion are vegetables than should be. They want to be the authorities on gerunds, or Thucydides, or supines in -um, or binomial theorems, or acid radicals, and they get to care for nothing else. If there were only a dozen fellowships reserved for men who didn’t mean to work at anything, it would be all right, but when every one cares for his own line more than anything else, you get a want of proportion. Collectively they care for nothing but lines, individually each for his own line. And, after all, lines are a very small part of life. What difference would it make to any one if there was no such thing as the deliberative subjunctive?”

Markham did not reply for a moment.

“No one supposes it would,” he said, after a pause, “but you must remember that grammar is not necessarily uninteresting because it doesn’t interest you. In any case let’s walk down to the bridge.”

“All right. Where are my shoes, and my coat? Ah, I’m sitting on it!”

Tom’s rooms were on the ground floor on the side of the court facing the chapel. The moon had risen in a soft blue sky, and as they stepped into the open air they paused a moment.

The side of the chapel opposite them was bathed in whitest light, cast obliquely on to it, and buttresses and pinnacles were outlined with shadows. The great shield-bearing dragons perched high above the little side-chapels stood out clear-lined and fantastic from their backgrounds, and the great crowned roses and portcullis beneath them looked as if they were cut in ivory and ebony. The moon caught a hundred uneven points in the windows, giving almost the impression that the chapel was lighted inside. To the east and west rose the four pinnacles dreamlike into the vault of the sky. In front of them stretched the level close-cut lawn looking black beneath the moonlight, and from the centre came the gentle metallic drip of the fountain into its stone basin. Towards the town the gas-lit streets shot a reddish glare through the white light, and now and then a late cab rattled across the stone-lined rails of the tramway. From the left there came from the rooms of some musically minded undergraduate the sound of a rich, fruity voice, singing, “I want no star in heaven to guide me,” followed by “a confused noise within,” exactly as if some one had sat down on the piano.

Tom murmured, “I want no songs by Mr. Tosti,” drew his hand through Markham’s arm, and they strolled down together towards the river.

“Of course I don’t mean that you’ll become like Marshall,” he said, “but it does make me wild to think of the lives some of these people lead. They don’t care for anything they should care about, and even if they do care about it, they never let you know it, or talk of it. Oh, Teddy, don’t become a vegetable!”

“And yet when I came up,” said Markham, “my father used to write me letters, asking me about my new impressions, and this fresh world that was opening round me, and there really wasn’t any fresh world opening round me, and I didn’t have any new impressions of any sort. It seemed to me like any other place—and I was expected to feel the bustle and the stir, and the active thought, and temptations, and I don’t know what beside.”

“O Lord!” sighed Tom. “I know just the sort of thing. I don’t know if there is any bustle and stir, and active thought, but I certainly never came across them. Doesn’t the Cambridge Review call itself the ‘Journal of University Life and Thought?’ Meditate on that a moment. As for temptations, the only temptations I know of are not to be dressed by eight, not to go to Sunday morning chapel, and not to work from nine till two. But I’ve been acquainted with all those temptations all my life, except that one had to be up by 7.30 at Eton. The temptations, in fact, are less severe here.”

“I don’t know how it is,” said Ted, “but whenever people write books about Cambridge, they make the bad undergraduates go to gambling hells on the Chesterton Road, and the good ones be filled with ennobling thoughts when they contemplate their stately chapel. Did you ever go to a gambling hell on the Chesterton Road, Tom?”

“No; do you ever have ennobling thoughts when you look at the stately chapel? Of course you don’t. You think it’s deuced pretty, and so do I, and we both play whist with threepenny points; and as a matter of fact we don’t fall in love with each other’s cousins at the May races, nor do we sport deans into their rooms, nor do deans marry bedmakers. Oh, we are very ordinary!”

“I feel a temptation to walk across the grass,” said Ted.

“Yes, you’re the wicked B.A. who leads the fresh, bright undergraduate—that’s me—into all sorts of snares. What fools people are!”

Tom sat on the balustrade of the bridge and lit a pipe. The match burned steadily in the still night air.

“Now, Teddy, listen,” he said, and he dropped it over into the black water. There was a moment’s silence as it fell through the air; then a sudden subdued hiss as the red-hot dottel was quenched.

“I wonder if you know how nice that is,” said Tom. “I don’t believe you enjoy that sort of thing a bit.”

“Dropping matches into the river?” asked Markham. “No, I don’t know that I care for it very much.”

“Oh, it’s awfully nice,” said Tom. “Here goes another. There—that little hiss after the silence. Fusees would be even better. No; you haven’t got an artistic soul. Never mind; it would be dreadfully in your way up here. Teddy, stop up here till the end of the month, and then come and stay with us a bit. You needn’t shoot unless you like.”

“Yes, I shall stop up till the end, but I don’t know whether I can come home with you. I ought to work.”

“What rot it is!” said Tom angrily. “You’ve been working for six months quite continuously, and you think you can’t spare a week to be sociable in. What on earth does your wretched work matter, if you do nothing else? What is the good of a man who only works?”

“More good than a man who never works. But I agree with you, really.”

“Well, but you behave as if you didn’t think so,” said Tom. “The other day you said you sympathized with that wretched grammarian in Browning, who spent his whole life in settling the question of the Enclitic ἀν, or some folly of that sort, and caught a cold on his chest in consequence, and had integral calculus and tussis, and a hundred other things. Very right and proper. Have you got any syphons? I wish for whisky. Well, will you come home with me or not? I’m not going to press you.”

“No, I don’t want pressing. Yes, I’ll come. I should like to very much. You leave one alone, which is the first quality of a host.”

They strolled up again, as the clock began to strike twelve.

“I’m sure I’ve done you much more good than you’d have got in an hour out of your Herodotus,” said Tom. “There is one really good point about you, and that is that if you are told something you think about it. I shouldn’t wonder if I found you dropping matches into the Cam some night soon.”

“It’s quite possible. Let’s see, what is the point of it?—the sudden splash at the end of the silence, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is like so many things. It’s like a mole burrowing silently in the earth, and then suddenly coming out at a different place. You needn’t examine that analogy. It’s like what I am going to do. I’m going to work very hard and quite silently for several years, and then suddenly I’m going to make a splash.”

“But are you going out immediately afterwards—like the match?”

“I don’t know; perhaps I shall—who knows?”

“Tom, are you aware that we are talking exactly like the people in books about Cambridge—the two friends, you know, who walk about on moonlight nights, and meditate on life and being?”

“God forbid!” said Tom piously. “But we’d better go indoors, just to be safe. Those people are so ridiculous only because they are always the same. Of course we all do meditate a little on life and being, but we do other things besides. But they come out in the evening like rabbits out of their burrow, and disappear again till the next evening. I’m going to play cricket to-morrow. They never do that.”

“And drink whisky now. They never do that.”

“No. To drink whisky is next door to going to the gambling hell on the Chesterton Road. Don’t go to bed yet. Come to my room.”

“I thought you wanted a syphon.”

“Yes; go and get one, will you, and bring it round.”

“Any more orders?” asked Markham.

“Oh yes,” said Tom—“some tobacco. I’ve run out.”

The Long Vacation Term was, so Tom thought, a really admirable institution, and it might have been invented exclusively for him. None of the colleges are more than half full, there are no lectures, and no need of wearing caps and gowns. The usual things go on as usual, but in a less emphatic manner. Those who wish to work do so, but not with any sense of being ill-used if they are interrupted; college matches take place, but they are not matters of first-class importance, or of first-class cricket. There is a country-house atmosphere about the place, an atmosphere of flannel trousers in the morning, of never being in a hurry, of a good deal of slackly played lawn tennis, and going on the river in canoes. This suited Tom very well, for he was more than anything else an ambitious loafer, who might turn out a loafer without ambition or an ambitious man. Successful loafing is not a gift to be despised; it requires a certain amount of ability, for the successful loafer must never be bored with doing nothing. Tom had quite enough ability to be thoroughly successful in this line; he was clever, artistic, original, and full of many interests, and in consequence he loafed from year’s end to year’s end without ever wishing to do anything else, though he meant to do other things often enough. He played games well, but amateurishly, not taking them seriously enough to be pre-eminent in anything from rowing down to chess, but finding amusement in them, often playing a good innings at cricket when it was not wanted, and given to slog at dangerous balls when it was particularly important that he should keep his wicket up. “College matches in the Long,” as he explained, were about his form.

He was for ever coming into harmless little collisions with the arm of the academic law, being found in the streets after dark without cap or gown, not from any wish to transgress the regulations which the accumulated wisdom of generations had framed, but from considering in a genial way, on each particular occasion, that it was a matter of no importance. In the same way, if he more frequently walked across the hallowed grass than he went round by the path, or if Mr. Carlingford’s name was more often conspicuous by its absence than its presence from the boards that told how many undergraduates attended lectures, he evinced such frank surprise when the matter was brought home to him, was so ready to express regret for what had happened, and so identified himself with his tutor’s wish that it should not occur again, that the offence seemed at once to appear in an almost wholly unobjectionable light. He was now at the end of his second year at Cambridge, and the prospects of his getting through a Tripos with any credit either to himself or his teachers were small. His teachers regretted this more probably than Tom himself, for they were quite aware of his ability, or at least his power to do better than badly, while Tom was supremely unconscious of it. He had been told that a Tripos was a test of merit, and he accepted the fact cheerfully, even when coupled with the assurance that he would probably only get a third. Tom drew the inference that he was therefore a fool, and neither wished to dispute it nor disprove it. He was, perhaps, conscious of a feeling that a great many men who seemed to him to be extraordinarily dull took brilliant degrees, and supposed that he was wrong in thinking them dull, or at any rate that the abilities which ensured good degrees were compatible in the same man with the extremes of social deficiencies. Meantime he made admirable little sketches of his friends in the margin of his books, and on sheets of paper during lecture hours; settled down to the belief that his mission was to be a sculptor, and was almost surprised that the hour had passed so soon. For the rest he was a young man of twenty-one, of rather more than medium height, with an extraordinarily pleasant face and a pair of honest brown eyes, which looked quite straight at you, and always seemed to be glad to see you. He looked intensely English, and pre-eminently clean among that race of clean men. Even Mr. Marshall, about whom Tom has already hazarded an opinion, had been heard to say that Carlingford was an uncommonly pleasant fellow, though he hardly ever came to have his Latin prose looked over.

It was nearer ten o’clock than nine when Tom emerged half dressed from his bedroom next morning, to find two or three cold pieces of bacon waiting for him, which he inspected with an air of slight but resigned curiosity. It really seemed so odd that this world should contain things so undesirable as pieces of cold crinkled bacon; the reasons for their existence were as unintelligible as the causes which produced centipedes or deliberative subjunctives. Markham came in at this moment, for Tom had said he was coming to work with him at half-past nine, but his face expressed no surprise.

“Come in, old man,” said Tom. “I hate people who say ‘old man,’ don’t you? Have you come to breakfast? That’s right. Sit down, and help yourself. I’ve breakfasted ages ago, and I’m afraid the tea’s quite cold. Never mind, I’ll make some more. You may think I’m foolish, but it’s not so. As a matter of fact, I didn’t wake till half-past nine. Make tea, Teddy; I’ll be ready in a minute.”

“I didn’t come here to make tea for you, but to work,” said Markham, lighting the spirit-lamp.

“Well, you’re late, then,” said Tom; “you said you’d be here at half-past nine, and it’s close on ten. And I wish it was eleven.”

“Why?”

“Because I should have shaved, and have eaten a little cold crinkled bacon. Also perhaps have done a little work. But about that I can’t say. By the way,” he called out from his bedroom, “Teddy!”

“Well?”

“I’m going to study the antique this morning in the Cast Museum. Come too?”

“Rot!”

“What?”

“Rot!”

“Oh! This is rather a brilliant conversation, isn’t it? Well, I’m going there really. Do come. You’ll see some pretty things. I wish I’d done the Discobolus. I should have, if some one hadn’t thought of it first. I shall do a man shying a cricket-ball. Pull the string and the model will work.”

Tom emerged from his bedroom and sat down to the cold bacon.

“I shall complain of the cook,” he remarked. “This bacon is cold. I didn’t order cold bacon. I’m not a hedger and ditcher. What are hedgers and ditchers? Anyhow, they eat cold bacon in hedges and ditches. I’ve seen them myself.”

“Perhaps you didn’t order your breakfast at three minutes to ten.”

“Don’t be snappy, Ted. But you’re quite right. I don’t know what they mean by it. Was it you who came in here about half-past eight, and knocked at my door?”

“No. I shouldn’t have stopped there. But I thought you said you didn’t awake till after nine.”

“Oh, that was afterwards. I didn’t awake that time till after nine. You see it was quite an accident that some one came in here at half-past eight, and I couldn’t conscientiously count that. I’m sure you must see that no one with any sense of honour could have taken advantage of that.”

“No, it would have been hardly fair, would it?” said Markham dryly. “A tricky sort of thing to do. Where did you say you were going to spend the morning?”

“At the Archæological Museum. I went there yesterday for the first time. They’ve got no end of casts. All the best Greek things, you know.”

“It won’t help you much in your Tripos, will it?”

“No, of course it won’t,” shouted Tom. “Good heavens, to hear you talk, one would think that a man’s place in heaven was decided by his Tripos, not to mention his place on earth! I’m not going to be a don or a schoolmaster, as I told you last night——”

“Frowsy don,” said Markham.

“All right, frowsy don, and I don’t care a blow whether I get ploughed or not. I don’t feel the least interest in any of the books I have to read, so why should I read them?”

“Then why do you ever read at all?”

“Because dons and other people, like you, for instance, make such a fuss if I don’t.”

Markham walked to the window and pulled up the blind, letting a great hot square of sunshine in upon the carpet.

“I wonder at your considering that sufficient reason. Of course I’m grateful for the compliment. Personally I should never think of doing a thing because you would make a fuss if I did not.”

“Oh, go home, Teddy,” said Tom in cordial invitation. “You talk like pieces for Latin prose. Look here, I’m going to the museum for an hour, and then I shall come and work. This afternoon we play some college—John’s, I think—on our ground. You said you’d play. We shall begin at two sharp. Mind you work very hard all the morning, and try to finish the fifth book of Herodotus—or whatever it is—before lunch. I hope you always mark your book with a pencil, and if you find any difficulties, bring them to me.”

Tom laid a paternal hand on Markham’s shoulder, and blew a smoke-ring at him.

“And now I’m going to study the heathen antique. I wish you’d come. It would really do you good. For me of course it’s necessary, as I’m going to be a sculptor. Teddy, will you be my model for ‘The Academic Don’? I’m going to do a statue of the academic don, a mixture of you and Marshall and a few others—a type, you know, not an individual. That’s always going to be my plan. I shall do a pedimental group, ‘Typical Developments of Modern Dons.’ In the centre the don stands upright, looking more or less like an ordinary man: then you see him beginning to stoop, then sitting down, getting more and more like a vegetable at each stage, and in the corner there will be two large decayed cauliflowers, with fine caterpillars crawling all over them. In ten years you shall sit for the cauliflower. Good-bye.”

Tom banged the door after him and went off to his museum, and there was nothing left for Ted but to follow his advice and begin working, which he did in a savage spirit. Like many rather silent, rather serious people, he found a great stimulus in the presence of some one who, like Tom, was hardly ever serious, and never silent. He made periodical attempts to take Tom in hand, but, like most people who had tried to do so, his efforts were not very successful. Tom had loafing in the blood, and his ambitions did not run in the lines of Triposes. At the same time it was owing to him that Tom had not at present failed very signally in college examinations, for Ted had succeeded in making him work, if not steadily, at least intermittently. Tom’s fits of intermittent work had not, it is true, occurred very often, but when they did occur they lasted sometimes for a week, of eight-hour days, and left him idler than ever. But, from Ted’s point of view, a widely supported and seemingly rational one—that men came up to the university partly at least to work, and that examinations were the criterion whereby the success of nine terms of residence was judged—these intermittent fits were better than nothing, and when they were induced just before an examination they led to results which, though superficial, were, according to the standard he measured them by, tolerably satisfactory. Tom never professed to feel the least interest in what he was working at, but pressure would sometimes make him work; and a very vivid memory, though one of short range, enabled him to reproduce the results of his week’s cramming.

But Tom’s influence over his friend was of a much more personal and vital kind. Ted looked on to the time when Tom should go down, and leave him, as he hoped, to a permanent university life, with blankness. He formed few friendships—and he had never been intimate with any one before. Tom’s healthy, out-of-door sort of mind, coupled with his artistic and picturesque ability, and his personal charm, had for him a unique attraction. You may see an even further development of the same phenomenon sometimes in the lower animals. A staid senior collie will often strike up an intimacy with a frisky young kitten, though it is hard to understand what the common ground between them is. The collie is not happy without the kitten, but unfortunately the kitten is quite happy without the collie—in fact, it would find the continuance of its exclusive society a little tedious.

CHAPTER II.

Tom came back from his museum about twelve, in an unusually sombre mood: the Discobolus apparently had not proved inspiring; and he took his books to Markham’s rooms, tumbled them all down on the floor, lit a pipe, and took up his parable.

“Those things are no good to me,” he said; “they may have been all very well when the race of men was a race of gods, when all the best athletes went to the games naked, and wrestled and boxed together; but it is out of date. Of course they are awfully beautiful, but they are obsolete.”

“Do you mean that you prefer Dresden china shepherdesses?” asked Markham.

“No, of course not; they are out of date too, and they are not beautiful. They are only clever, which is a very lamentable thing to be. No one was ever like that. An artist must represent men and women as he sees them, and he doesn’t see them nowadays either in the Greek style or in the Dresden style. Yet how are you to make knickerbockers statuesque?”

“You aren’t; or do you mean to say that the artists of every age must reproduce the costume of every age? Surely, if we all dressed in sacks, you couldn’t represent them.”

“Yes, but we never shall dress in sacks,” said Tom; “that makes just the difference, or rather there will be no sculptors if we do. To look at a well-made man going out shooting gives one a sense of satisfaction: what I want to do is to make statues like them, which will give you the same satisfaction. Somebody wrote an article somewhere on the incomparable beauty of modern dress. I didn’t read it, but it must be all wrong. It is the ugliest dress ever invented. How can you make waistcoats statuesque? I haven’t got one on for that reason.”

“Tom, do you mean to do any work this morning?” asked Markham.

Tom shook his head.

“No, I’ve got something more important to think about. Do you see my difficulty? I want to make trousers beautiful, and women’s evening dress beautiful, and shirt sleeves beautiful.”

“Shirt sleeves are not beautiful,” said Markham; “how can you make them so, and yet be truthful?”

“My dear fellow, it is exactly that which it is a sculptor’s business to find out,” said Tom. “I don’t mean I shall make them beautiful in the same way as the robes of the goddesses in the Parthenon pediments are beautiful, but I shall make them admirable somehow. I shall make you feel satisfied when you look at them. Think of that boxer’s head in the British Museum: he must have been an ugly lout, but what a masterpiece it is! That is a much greater triumph than the Discobolus, simply because it represents an ugly man.”

“Tom, don’t pretend you belong to the school that says that everything that exists is worth representing. No one wants to see drawings of dunghills.”

Tom rose from his chair and began to walk about the room.

“I don’t know,” he said, “I can’t be sure about it. Before I judge I shall go and see the best things that are to be seen. I shall go to Rome, I shall go to Athens—Athens first, I think. I don’t want to be influenced by any modern art, and if you go to Rome you must fall in with some modern school or other: there are too many artists at Rome. Yes, I shall go to Athens the autumn after I have taken my degree. But I expect to be disappointed. It will all be beautiful, but it will be all obsolete, and that will be distressing. Greek statues are in the grand style, like the Acropolis, I expect. They were perfect for that age and for that people, but I don’t think they would do now. We’re not in the grand style at all. We wear cloth caps and Norfolk jackets. Fancy the Discobolus in a Norfolk jacket, or Athene in a bonnet and high heels. I shall go and talk to Marshall about Athens. He’s been there. You play this afternoon, Teddy, you know. Two sharp. I’m going to lunch in hall at one.”

Tom gathered his books together, preparatory to leaving the room. “I wish I hadn’t gone to that Museum,” he said; “it’s put me out of conceit. You can’t do anything good unless you believe in yourself. People talk of humility being a virtue; if so, it’s one of the seven deadly virtues.”

Tom met Mr. Marshall going across the court, and assailed him with questions about Athens. This eminent scholar was a small man, with a quick, nervous manner and weak, blinking eyes. He had a nose like a beak, which completed his resemblance to a young owl.

“Athens, yes. I was there six years ago,” he said. “I remember it rained a good deal. The Acropolis, of course, is very fine. There is, as you know, a beautiful temple to Minerva on it. I calculated that the blocks composing the row of masonry above the pillar must have weighed fifteen or twenty tons each. I was very much interested in speculating how they got them into place. Yes.”

“I’m going to work there,” said Tom, “after I’ve taken my degree. I suppose they’ve got masses of things there.”

“The museums are very considerable buildings,” said Marshall. “I was very much struck by the size of them. I should be most pleased to be of any use to you, in the way of recommending hotels and so forth.”

“Many thanks,” said Tom. “I shall ask you again about it, if I may.”

Tom went to his rooms, and addressed his piano dramatically. “That is a tutor,” he said.

He went up rather late to cricket, being the captain, and having warned every one that the match was going to begin at two sharp, won the toss, went in himself, and got bowled during the first over, in trying to slog a well-pitched ball over long-on’s head.

“I vote we declare the innings closed,” he said, as he returned to the pavilion. “To close our innings for one run would be so original that it would be really worth while just once. Hit them about, Teddy, and make a century!”

Tom had the satisfaction of seeing his side make between two and three hundred, but however gratifying this was to him as a member of the team, it was tempered with other feelings. He went and bowled at the nets for half an hour, watched the game a little, and felt that his applause was hollow. Markham was playing characteristically; that is to say, he left dangerous balls on the off alone, hit hard and well at badly pitched ones, and played good-length balls with care and precision.

“There’s no fun in that,” thought Tom to himself; “any one can do that. All the same any one can get out first ball, like me, if they play the ass.”

Markham was in about an hour, and when it was over he and Tom went to get tea.

“I wish you’d had a decent innings instead of me,” said Markham, as they walked off to the pavilion.

“Nonsense, Teddy; you played very well.”

“I mean you enjoy it much more than I do.”

“Well, that’s your fault. Hullo, there’s Pritchard out!”

Pritchard came up to them, dangling his glove in his hand, with much to say.

“It’s a beastly light,” he began, as soon as he was up to them. “I played the ball all right, but I simply couldn’t see it. Besides, it shot.”

“Well, it was just the other way with me,” remarked Tom. “I saw the ball all right, but I couldn’t play it, and it didn’t shoot.”

“Oh, you tried to slog your first ball,” said he, walking away.

Tom and Markham sat down under the chestnut-tree and drank their tea.

“Shall I come to you as soon as term is over?” asked Markham. “The last day of term is Saturday week, you know.”

“Hang it! so it is. Yes, come at once; it will be the twenty-ninth, won’t it? Thirty days hath—no there are thirty-one. Tuesday will be the first. You may come and carry my cartridges if you won’t shoot.”

“That will be charming. I can’t see what the fun of hitting little brown birds is.”

“Oh, well, you may always miss! But if you come to that, what’s the fun of hitting a little red cricket-ball?”

“Well, you may always miss that,” said Markham, “just as you did, Tom! Besides, if you hit it you score runs.”

“Well, if you hit the little brown bird twice, you score a brace of partridges. Besides, you have a nice walk over turnips and mangolds——”

“Well, you can do that in August.”

“Oh, Teddy, there’s no hope for you!” said Tom. “When you die and go to hell, they’ll make you shoot all day until you love it, and then they’ll send you to heaven, where there is no shooting at all. I don’t suppose there are such things as rocketing angels, are there?”

“Tom, the only excuse for being profane is being funny.”

“All right. But I don’t see why there shouldn’t be. There is such a thing as a shooting star.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m sure I don’t know,” said Tom. “Of course there was some connection in my mind, or I shouldn’t have said it.”

“Do you mean that no one, even you, can talk sheer drivel?”

“Don’t ask so many questions, Teddy. We shall be all out in a minute; there’s the ninth wicket down. Come on, we’ll give those beggars a chance. You know it is all nonsense saying that trousers and shirts are not beautiful. Look at Harold bowling there. Do you see how the wind blows the shirt tight over his shoulder? That’s an opportunity for a sculptor which the Greeks didn’t use—you get all the shape of the arm, and that look of wind and motion which the loose flap of the sleeve gives.”

“I should advise you to do a statue of a man bowling in a high wind,” said Markham.

“I’m going to—just at the moment when the ball leaves his hand, one leg right forward, with the trouser loose on it, the other leg back with the trouser tight. It’s all nonsense about momentary postures not being statuesque. They are statuesque above all others. I don’t call those knights in armour on Gothic tombs statuesque. Sculpture represents life, not death. There! why the deuce Hargrave tried to hit that ball, I don’t know. Of course it bowled him.”

“Thomas Carlingford did the same,” said Markham.

“I know he did. That’s why he has every right to express his opinion, as it is strictly founded on experience. Look sharp with the roller! We’ll go out at once.”

The remaining fortnight of the Long passed away quickly and uneventfully, and by degrees the colleges began to empty themselves. In King’s hardly any one was left except Tom and Markham, who played tennis together when there was no longer a cricket team available, and spent the mornings, Markham working, Tom doing anything else by preference. The latter got hold of a lump of modelling wax, and made the prettiest possible sketch, as he had intended, of a man bowling. The figure was charmingly fresh, and had a certain masterly look about it which showed through all its defects. Tom lost his temper with it twenty times a day, and twice crushed the whole thing into a shapeless mass, was sorry he had done so, and set to work again. He had never had any teaching, but there was no doubt that he had got the artist’s fingers, which are of more importance than many lessons. Lessons you can obtain in exchange for varying sums of money, and artist’s fingers are a free gift, but they are given to the few.

Meantime Markham bent his grave, black-haired head over his Herodotus, and sat on a cane-backed chair at the table, while Tom lolled in the window-seat, and poured out floods of desultory criticism on every subject under the sun. At times Markham gathered up his books impatiently, and left the room, declaring that it was impossible to do anything if Tom was there; but after a quarter of an hour or so he always wished that Tom would follow him, and at the end of half an hour he usually went back, finding that the wish to be with him was stronger than the wish to get on with his work. Tom apparently was quite unconscious of all this. He was always very fond of the other, but in a breezy, out-of-door manner, and he would always have preferred playing cricket, with or without his friend, to his undivided company at home, while Markham had been conscious on several occasions of being glad when it rained, making cricket impossible, but making it natural for Tom to come to him to be supplied with other amusements.

Once during this week the two had settled, in default of other things to do, to go up the river and have tea at Byron’s pool, bathe, and come home again in the evening. But during the morning a note had come for Tom, asking him to play for an inter-college club against a town club, and he accepted with alacrity, and went to Markham’s room to tell him that he couldn’t come with him.

Markham said, “All right,” without looking up from his books; but for some reason Tom was unsatisfied. He paused with his hand on the door.

“You don’t mind, do you?” he said.

“I don’t want you not to play,” said Markham coolly.

“What’s the matter?” asked Tom in surprise.

Markham got up and went to the window.

“Nothing. Mind you make some runs.”

But Tom still lingered.

“Look here, I’ll come up the river if you are keen about it. I only thought we settled to do it if nothing else turned up.”

Markham recovered himself.

“Yes, it’s perfectly right, Tom. Bring your books in here and work till lunch.”

“No, I can’t; we’re going to begin at one. I shall go and have some lunch now. You can get some one else to go up the river with you, you know; no one is doing anything this afternoon.”

“No, I don’t think I shall go; I don’t want to much. Are you playing on the Piece? I shall stroll down there after lunch.”

Markham’s father was the incumbent of a small living about ten miles from Cambridge, where he spent a happy, and therefore a good life, doing his parish work with great regularity and no enthusiasm, reading Sir Walter Scott’s novels through again and again, looking after a rather famous breed of spaniels, and editing, at intervals of about three years, an edition of some classic, adapted, as he suggested in his prefaces, for the higher forms in public schools. His religion was a matter of quiet conviction to him, and his other conviction in life—two convictions is a large allowance for an average man—was his belief in the classics. Ted had been brought up in the same convictions, and at present had shown no signs, outward or inward, of departing from either of them. The nearest approach he had had to abandoning either was due to Tom’s frank inability to find amusement or interest in classics, for Markham, recognizing his undoubted ability, could not quite dismiss his opinion off-hand. The father’s wish for the son was that he should be a great Christian apologist, in Orders as a matter of course, and a Fellow of his college. At times, Markham suspected that Tom’s religion had no greater place in his interests than classics; but of this he knew nothing, for nine young men out of ten do not talk about their religion, even if they know about it, and Tom was emphatically not the tenth.

Ted left Cambridge to go home two days before the end of term, for Chesterford was on Tom’s way, and he wished to pick up some books at home, and leave others there.

His father met him at the station, driving a neat, rather unclerically high dog-cart, accompanied by two spaniels and a horsey-looking lad, who was coachman, gardener, and organ-blower in church. Mr. Markham was a tallish, distinguished-looking man, in whom the resemblance to his son could be traced; he wore a straw hat and a grey coat, so that, had it not been for his white tie, you would perhaps have been at a loss to guess what his profession was.

“Well, my boy,” he said heartily, “I’m glad to see you, though it is for such a short time. Have you got all your luggage? Jim will put it in the cart for you. I’ve got a thing or two to do in the village,” he continued, taking the reins. “Wroxly tells me he’s got some wonderful stuff for the distemper, and Flo is down with it, poor lass! She’s a bit better this morning, and I think we shall pull her through.”

“Which is Flo?” asked Ted, who thought dogs were uninteresting.

“Flo? She’s one of the last lot, born in April—don’t you remember? She’s the best of them all, I think. Wonderful long silky ears.”

“That’s no clue to me, father,” said Ted. “I always think they are all just alike.”

“Ah, well, my boy, they aren’t so important as classics. I read that note of yours in the Classical Review, and it seemed to me uncommonly good. How has your work been getting on?”

“Oh, fairly well, thanks. I haven’t done much lately, though. I’ve been looking after Tom Carlingford.”

“That’s the boy who was here a year ago, isn’t it? You’re going to him to-morrow, I think you said. Get him to come here again, Ted; we all liked him so much. Not much of a classic, I should think——”

“No. Tom doesn’t care for classics,” said Ted, “and there’s no reason why he should work at them, you see. He’s awfully rich, and he’s going to be a sculptor.”

“A sculptor—that’s rather an irregular profession.”

“Yes. Tom’s irregular, too.”

“Has he got any ability?”

“I always think he’s extremely clever,” said Ted with finality.

“Dear me, he didn’t strike me as clever at all,” said his father. “I remember he spent most of his time skating, and sitting by the fire reading old volumes of Punch.”

“I dare say I’m wrong,” said Ted. “You see, I’m very fond of him. Ah, here we are, and here’s May coming down the drive to meet us!”

If Tom had spent his time skating and reading Punch when he might have been talking to May—always supposing that May did not skate and did not read Punch with him—he was a fool. That, however, is probably sufficiently obvious already. In this case, Tom’s folly consisted in preferring even old volumes of Punch to the society and conversation of a typical English girl of the upper classes, tall, fair, slim, just at that period of her life when the blush of girlhood is growing into the light of womanhood, a girl whose destiny it clearly was to be a wife, and the mother of long-limbed boys who yearn all their boyhood to be men, and who become men, real men, at the proper time.

Ted jumped down off the dog-cart as it turned up the steep drive, leaving his father there; and the brother and sister walked up to the house together.

“Yes, it’s always the way, Ted,” she said; “you come here one day and go off the next. And you promised to be here all September!”

“Well, I shall be here nearly all September,” said he. “I’m only going to the Carlingfords’ for a week.”

“How is Mr. Carlingford?” asked May, after a pause.

“He’s all right. He always is. He has talked a good deal, and done very little work. He also made one century in a college match, and followed it up by five ducks.”

“I thought you were going to bring him here again.”

“Yes,” said Ted, “I had thought of it. But he asked me to go back with him for a bit.”

They had reached the house by this time, and Mr. Markham was just going off to the kennels, to try the effect of the new medicine on Flo.

“Flo’s a good deal better, father,” said May; “I think she’s getting over it.”

“Ah, I’m glad of that. But I shall just try her with this. By the way, did you take those books you have been covering to the parish library?”

“Yes, I took them this morning, and brought back some others.”

“That’s a good girl! And the meeting of the outdoor relief fund?”

“It went all right. Come down to the lake, Ted, and we’ll paddle about.”

They walked across the lawn, down over two fields, now green and tall with the aftermath, and pushed off in a somewhat antiquated boat.

“Well, May, how have things been going?”

“Oh, much as usual! I’ve been busy lately. Oh, Ted, isn’t it lovely? Look at the reflections there. I do love this place!”

“Could you live here always?” asked Ted.

“Why, yes, of course; what more can one want? I should hate to live in a town! And think of leaving the village, and all the dear dull old people! I like dull old people—I like little ordinary things to do, like covering parish books. That’s the life I should choose—wouldn’t you?”

Ted did not answer for a moment.

“Yes, I think I should. All the same, you know—— No, I like this best.”

“People talk of the stir and bustle of London,” went on May, dipping her hand into the water, and pulling up a long flowering reed, “but I should detest that. It would frighten me.”

“It’s my opinion that the bustle and stir is exaggerated,” said Ted. “People are much the same all the world over.”

“I don’t think that,” said May. “Miss Wrexham was here last week, staying at the Hall; father and I dined there once while she was here. Well, she is quite a different sort of person. She was always talking, and wanting to do something else. She couldn’t sit still for two minutes together, and she talked in a way I didn’t understand.”

“How do you mean?”

“I can’t express it exactly,” said May. “She seemed to belong to a different order of woman altogether. One morning she asked me if I did any work in the parish. I told her the sort of things I spend my day in, and she said, ‘Oh, that must be so sweet! just living in a country place like this, and seeing poor people, and going to early celebrations. I suppose you go to London, don’t you, in the summer?’ Then, of course, I had to explain that country clergymen couldn’t do that sort of thing, and she said how stupid it was of her, and would I forgive her. She talked as if all one did was the same kind of thing—as if covering parish books was the same thing as going to communion. And why should she ask me to forgive her?”

“I imagine you didn’t like her much,” said Ted.

“No, I can’t say that I did. I don’t think she is genuine.”

“Oh, you can’t tell,” said Ted. “I know several people like that, and they are just the same as we are, just as genuine certainly, but they say whatever comes into their heads.”

“Well, that’s not genuine,” objected May.

“I don’t see why.”

“Because what you say ought to represent what you are. If you say anything that comes into your head, you make the big things and the little things all equal. Pull round, will you?—there’s the luncheon-bell.”

CHAPTER III.

Mr. Carlingford lived in an ugly but comfortable house among the broad-backed Surrey Downs, generally alone, for a life of sixty-eight years had convinced him that he found his own society less tedious than that of his friends. He made, however, one exception in favour of Tom, for whom he had a considerable liking. He had married late, had been a widower for twenty-one years—since Tom’s birth—and had no other children. He seldom spoke of his wife, so that we have no means of finding out whether he included her in the verdict he mentally passed on his friends, but there is no reason to suppose that he did not.

His house, Applethorpe Manor, he rented from the owner, who was in straitened circumstances; he refused to buy it, for, as he said, he would probably not live much longer, and it was more than possible that Tom would not want to keep it, and would very likely sell it for much under its value. But Tom might have been well content to keep such a place; it stood admirably, surrounded by its own grounds, and a park of some six hundred acres stretched away from halfway up the gentle slope in front of the house to the top of the down. Behind, the hill-slope declined rapidly away to the bottom of the valley, in which lay the little red-roofed village, overlooked by a church, in which a nineteenth-century architect had accomplished his wicked will, dealing death to early Norman work. On the other side of the village another down rose in gentle slopes of yellowing autumn fields, planted here and there with beech and oak woods. At intervals, the chalky sub-soil came to the surface like the bleached bones of the world, but for the most part a thick loamy earth hid the underlying barrenness.

South of the house lay a level lawn, dominated by a large cedar-tree, the horizontal fans of whose branches formed an effectual protection against sun, and even against rain; flower-beds arrayed in fantastic patterns, having for the centre of their system an Italian stone vase, stretched out to one side of this tree, while to the other the lawn lay steeped in summer suns, or grew rank and mossy under autumn rains. A terrace festooned with virginia-creeper and low-growing monthly roses bounded the lawn to the south, below which lay a long strip of flower-bed, and beyond, a broad hayfield, stretching down as far as the village.

But on the 1st of September, two days after the arrival of Tom and Markham, there were other guests in the house. Mr. Carlingford’s sister had married a peer, who privately considered his wife’s brother rather low, but tolerated him for the sake of his partridge-shooting, about which the most fastidious could not possibly be depreciatory. Lady Ramsden was a tall, sallow, and fretful woman, who literally enjoyed rather bad health, though not so bad as she imagined. In fact, her bad health only manifested itself in intermittent medicine-taking, stopping in bed for breakfast, and not going to church on Sunday. She was one of those women about whom people say, when they are yet in their teens, that they are sweetly pretty, but very delicate-looking; when they are about thirty, that they will not wear well; and when they are thirty-five, “Poor dear.” Lady Ramsden was forty, and her cup of ineffectiveness was full.

Her husband was clearly English, almost brutally English. The name of his nationality was, as it were, written in red ink all over his body and his mind, and he dressed, so to speak, in Union Jack. He was tall, well set up, had once represented his native borough in the House of Commons in his youth, and now in middle age, having repeatedly failed to get into the Lower House, had been awarded the Consolation Stakes, and sat in the Upper. He was fond of shooting, but shot badly, had several shelves in his library full of parliamentary blue-books, which he sent periodically to be bound up, but which were never looked at either before or after that operation, spent five months every year in London, and half the day in all those five months in the bow-window of his club, and the other seven months in the country, and told rather long-winded stories. The point of these stories was always well defined, because he himself always began to laugh just before he got to it, which was a very convenient habit.

The other two guests were Miss Wrexham, who had been staying near the Markhams a fortnight ago, and her brother Bob, who was in every respect like a young gentleman from Woolwich. He had been at Eton with Tom, and they had kept up a sort of acquaintance since: Tom had stayed with him, and he with Tom. In the intervals they never wrote to one another, but were extremely glad to see each other again. Tom had, to a superlative degree, the power of picking up a friendship at the point where it had stopped, and of carrying it forward as if there had been no interruption.

The shooters, consisting of Tom, Bob Wrexham, and Lord Ramsden, started soon after breakfast on the first; Markham had claimed the fulfilment of Tom’s promise, and had taken himself off to the smoking-room when they went out, and presumably spent a profitable though solitary morning there. The two ladies, Mr. Carlingford and he were going to walk out about half-past twelve, to a cottage some mile and a half off, and join the shooters at lunch. Lady Ramsden established herself at a writing-table in the drawing-room, wrote several unnecessary letters in a tall, angular hand, and Miss Wrexham, who always made a point of doing the paying thing, went out for a short ride with her host, and took an intelligent interest in all he said.

The shooting-party had already arrived at the luncheon-place when the others came, and were clamouring for food. Lord Ramsden, it was noticed sat a little apart, and was smoking a cigarette with an isolated and reserved air.

“Oh, what a sweet little cottage!” said Maud Wrexham, as they entered. “Mr. Carlingford, if I were you, I should come and live here. Why, there’s a warming-pan! Do you know, I don’t think I ever saw a warming-pan before. How clever it was of me to know it was one, wasn’t it? That’s what they call intuitive cerebration. I shall write to the Physical Research about it.”

Tom considered.

“Is it intuitive cerebration when one crosses the Channel for the first time, and sees the coast, to know that it is France? You have never seen it before, you know.”

Lady Ramsden gave a thin monosyllabic laugh.

“No, that’s only remembering what you have seen on an atlas,” said Maud. “I never saw a map of this cottage with ‘warming-pan’ marked on it.”

“The Physical Research Society are a company of amiable and intelligent lunatics,” remarked Mr. Carlingford. “Don’t have anything to do with them, Miss Wrexham. Are you ready for your lunch, Ramsden? What sort of sport have you had?”

Lord Ramsden threw away the end of his cigarette, which he had been smoking at the door, and came in.

“Birds very wild,” he said. “It’s no use walking them up.”

“Oh, we’ve got twelve brace,” said Tom, cheerfully. “It’s not so bad. However, we can drive after lunch; there are lots of them in the stubble, and we can’t get near them any other way.”

“Tom’s been talking art all the morning,” remarked Bob Wrexham; “I draw the line at talking art when you’re shooting.”

“You can’t do two things at once,” growled his lordship, who had not pursued the subject of the birds being wild.

“Tom never does less than two things at once,” said his father; “he says there isn’t time.”

“I can eat and talk at once,” said Tom, with his mouth full.

“Yes, old chap, and you can shoot more than one bird at once,” said Bob. “It was the most disgraceful thing I ever saw. Tom fired into the middle of a covey which ought to have been out of shot. The worst of it was that he killed a brace. However, it’s good for the bag.”

Mr. Carlingford was sitting next Tom, and murmured gently to him, “How odd it is that the only way to keep up your bags is to destroy your braces!”

Lord Ramsden was reviving a little under the influence of food. “I never can shoot in the morning,” he confessed; “it was always the way with me. Once at Ramsden I told them to have lunch ready at half-past eleven, so that we could have a long afternoon. And, by Jove, I didn’t miss the rest of the day. They were very much amused at it all.”

Mr. Carlingford regretted to himself that he was not a friend of Peter Magnus, but received his lordship’s remarks with cordiality, and after a quick lunch Tom got up.

“Well, we’d better be off again as soon as we can,” he said. “Teddy, you must come with us, and if you won’t shoot, you’ll see me do it. Miss Wrexham, I’m sure you want a walk.”

“I should love to come,” said she, “if I shan’t be in the way. But aren’t women a fearful nuisance when you are shooting? Bob always sends me home after lunch.”

“Yes,” said Bob, “Tom only asked you out of politeness. He meant you to refuse.”

“I don’t believe you did,” said she. “Anyhow, if you did, you may say so, and I’ll go home. I will, really; I shan’t be offended. I don’t know how.”

“May I be permitted to express a hope,” said Lord Ramsden, “that Miss Wrexham will grace—ah, exactly, will come with us? You’d better be getting home, dear,” he said to his wife. “You don’t want to trudge over ploughed fields.”

“Gracious, no!” said Lady Ramsden. “I’m sure I shall be tired out as it is.”

Miss Wrexham paired off with Markham, who had an ample opportunity of testing his sister’s judgment of her.

“It was so delicious, that little peep I had of your sister,” she said; “I long for that sort of life myself. She must be so happy with her dear little everyday duties. I’m sure that’s why there used to be saints, and why there are none now. People used to live like that in the country, just doing their duty; and then, when men began to herd into towns, they saw at once how beautiful the lives of those others must have been, so of course they canonized them.”

“I don’t know,” said Markham, who treated all subjects gravely; “I expect there is just as much opportunity for becoming a saint if you live in a town. Of course, it’s harder. After all, saints were only very good people with the power of making their goodness felt, and it’s harder to make yourself felt in London, because every one is in such a hurry.”

“Oh dear me, yes, it’s fearful to think of!” said Maud. “One is busy the whole day, and yet one gets nothing done—nothing worth doing, at least. I can’t imagine a saint living in London—that’s to say, doing what we naturally do in London. But if I lived in the country, it would be just as natural to do what your sister does. I’m always supposed to be frivolous, and I don’t know what; but it’s a great shame. Of course, I talk thirteen to the dozen, but that is no proof of frivolity. I’m sure your sister thought me frivolous, and I thought her so sweet. It’s not a bit fair.”

Ted did not reply, and after a moment Miss Wrexham continued——

“You can’t deny it, you see. Do you know, I think some of the saints must have been rather trying. It was St. Elizabeth, wasn’t it, who told her husband she’d only got some roses in her apron, when it was bread really? Poor dear! You see he knew it was bread, and she knew it was; and then, when she opened her apron, there was nothing but roses. I hope they pricked her—it really was mean. You know, if I was reading a novel on Sunday, and they asked me what book it was, I should say a novel. St. Elizabeth would have said a Septuagint. I hate her.”

Ted laughed.

“I wonder if you really care what my sister thought of you. Why should you care? You’ve only just seen her.”

“Ah, but what does that matter?” asked Maud. “Of course I care. I always make a point of being nice to people in railway carriages and ’buses—I always go in ’buses in London, don’t you?—even though I only see them for two minutes. I want to be nice to everybody. I care immensely what every one thinks of me.”

“But how can it matter?” said Ted. “Those people whom you meet just for two minutes have no opportunity of judging you. They form their impressions on perfectly superficial things.”

“Ah, I see! Your sister formed an unfavourable impression of me, and you excuse her by saying it was superficial.”

“I’ve got a great mind to tell you what she said,” remarked Ted.

Maud stopped for a moment, and turned to him.

“Ah, do tell me!”

“She said she thought you weren’t genuine.”

Maud stared for a moment in deep perplexity.

“Not genuine? Why—why, that is exactly what I am! Why did she think that?”

“I just remember her saying that you talked about early celebrations, and covering books for the parish library, as if they were one and the same thing.”

Maud stood still for a moment longer, recalling the scene, and then broke out into a light laugh.

“Oh, I see, I see!” she cried. “Oh dear me, how funny! She had every excuse for thinking that, but she was so wrong. She hasn’t got a picturesque mind, I’m afraid. But I saw the whole picture of her in her life there so clearly. You can talk of a Madonna and the little Italian landscape behind her chair in one breath, can’t you? She thought I regarded them as equally essential. I’m so glad you told me that. I never take offence; I only profit by such things if they are true, and forget them if they are not. There is an atom of truth in this, although, as I say, she was wrong.”

The shooters were waiting, when they got up to them, for a long narrow valley of stubble to be driven down, and Ted and Maud got under shelter of the same tall hedge, which separated the fields, and waited with them.

Markham went up to where Tom was standing. The latter at once began talking in a whisper about the artistic beauty of a drive.

“If you shoot, you are called a barbarian,” he explained. “That’s so silly. Why, a drive is the most beautiful thing there is! First you wait, hearing nothing—and then you hear little far-away sounds, and you know they are off. Then there comes that flight of stupid sparrows and small birds, and then silence again. Then there’s a sudden rush through the hedge, perhaps, and out comes a hare. And then—and then—‘Mark over!’ and you hear the whistling of wings, which sound as if they wanted oiling. And, best of all, that extraordinary ceasing of voluntary motion. The bird’s wings clap down to his sides, you know, but he still goes on as if he was alive. I killed a bird once that was coming towards me, and it fell slap on me and knocked me down. You needn’t believe me unless you like. There! They’ve started! Keep quiet, Teddy; it will all happen just as I said.”

Tom stepped a little way back from the hedge, in order to get a longer view, almost trembling with excitement as “Mark over!” sounded from higher up the valley. The covey came over Lord Ramsden, and he missed solemnly with both barrels.

“Those birds went on just as if they were alive,” remarked Ted in an undertone to Tom, who grinned maliciously.

“He missed eight birds this morning in succession,” he whispered; and then he said to Bob Wrexham, “You should see me play lawn-tennis. Look out, there’s another covey coming!”

A big lot approached the tall hedge like a stream, caught sight of Tom, and wheeled rapidly to the centre. Two, however, turned a little somersault in the air, and fell thirty yards behind him in the stubble.

“There, did you see?” asked Tom, reloading. “That’s another of those things like dropping matches in the Cam. They came blazing over, then there’s a little pause, and a thud. I’m afraid my poor uncle has missed again.”

Markham meditated.

“Yes, I see. That really was rather nice. There must be some satisfaction in doing that.”

“Of course, half the pleasure lies in not being certain whether you are going to hit or not. If I always hit I don’t think I should care about it—not so much, at any rate. It’s like gambling with an enormous proportion of chances in your favour if you play well.”

Miss Wrexham took almost as much interest in the proceedings as the shooters themselves, and she showed no wish to go back until they all went home. Lord Ramsden met with greater success towards the end of the afternoon, and they all returned in excellent spirits.

Tom and Miss Wrexham were walking a little in front of the others, and in answer to some questions of hers, he was saying what he was going to do when he left Cambridge.

“It must be such a blessing,” she said, “to know for certain, as you do, exactly what you want to be, and to be able to be it. Most people never know what they want to be. Bob is going into the army simply because he can’t think of anything else.”

“The worst of most professions is that they are only ways of making money,” said Tom. “Artists and clergymen are the only people who do what they have a passion for. No one can have a passion for cross-examining witnesses.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that!” objected Maud. “My mother—do you know my mother?—has a passion, literally a passion, for making arrangements. Really her chief joy in life is arranging things quite irrespective of what the arrangements are; but I think people like her are mostly women.”

“What is your passion?” asked Tom.

“Making people like me, especially if they hate me naturally. I wouldn’t say that it is my vocation, because lots of people detest me. Don’t trouble to say you don’t believe me. I am sure that sort of speech would come very badly from you.”

“Do you mean that I’ve got such awkward manners, or that I am naturally honest?”

“I mean that when a man doesn’t owe a compliment, it is no use his trying to pay one.”

“Compliments are a cheap way of paying debts. They are like apologies. I always apologize if it will do any good.”

Maud walked on in silence a little way.

“If I wasn’t a woman,” she said at length very slowly, “I should choose to be a man. No, it’s not such nonsense as it sounds. What I really mean is that men have great advantages over us in some ways. A woman can hardly ever become anything else than an amateur, and I want to be a professional artist, and a musician, and she-clergyman, living in the country. But I wouldn’t give up being a woman. Women have much more self than men, else they would have all taken to professions long ago. If men hadn’t professions they would all bore themselves to death. That is why they take to the Stock Exchange and politics—they do anything to make them forget their own selves. I don’t say that women are any better, but they find themselves more interesting than men do.”

“But men have to make money or else they couldn’t marry and support families,” said Tom rather feebly.

“Yes; but don’t you see that if women had not been sufficiently interested in themselves to make them not want professions, they would have had them long ago? They would both have worked for their living. As it is, a woman’s chief object is to marry a rich man, so that she can’t possibly work.”

“That’s a new idea,” said Tom. “What are you going to do with it?”

“How do you mean?”

“You ought to marry a poor man, and help him to earn his living.”

“Unfortunately I have lots of money myself.”

Tom drew in a deep breath.

“That is a misfortune. I am in the same state. One can’t give it all to a lunatic asylum, or else people think you are laying up treasure for your own dotage. I wish I was poor, really poor, you know, out at elbows, having to work for my bread. It must be exquisite to be poor.”

“It’s a ridiculous arrangement,” said Maud suddenly. “My grandmother left me heaps of money, and poor Bob none; now Bob wants money and I don’t. But I expect, if one was poor, one would get to like money.”

“No doubt one would,” said Tom, “but that would do one no harm. One would get to know what its value was. At present I haven’t the slightest idea. That is not being miserly—misers never know the value of money; they only know the price of things they want, but refuse to buy.”

They had reached the front door, and stood waiting for the others.

“One ought to be allowed to change circumstances with one’s friends,” said Tom. “I would choose Ted Markham’s circumstances. He is poor, and he is working at what he likes best. Just think how happy one would be! Success to him means the fullest possible success; position means opportunities.”

“What do you mean by opportunities?”

“Why, the University Press will consent to publish his editions of classical authors.”

“That’s narrow,” remarked Miss Wrexham. “Providence has spared me that limitation.”

“That’s what I’m always telling him. But it must be very comfortable to be narrow.”

“Until you know you are narrow.”

“Oh, but then you become broad,” said Tom, “and that’s nice too!”

“We are a pair of blighted beings,” said Miss Wrexham solemnly. “We have been made rich and broad, whereas we only want to be poor and narrow.”

“No, we should like to be narrow, if we couldn’t be broad,” said Tom—“just as you would like to be a man if you couldn’t be a woman.”

“Ah, well, one can’t have everything.”

Tom looked at her with radiant confidence.

“I mean to have everything!” he announced.

CHAPTER IV.

Tom went back to Cambridge for his third year with his mind fully made up as regard his career. He was alone with his father his last night at home, and they had talked the matter out—or rather Tom talked the matter out, and his father expressed acquiescence with his proposed arrangements, and mingled a little cynical advice.

“You see, I must be a sculptor, father,” Tom had said, “at least, that is my passion. If you wish me to go into the business or go to the bar, I’ll go, but that won’t be the work of my life. You don’t object, do you?”

They were sitting in the smoking-room after dinner before the fire, for October had started with early frosts, and Mr. Carlingford loathed cold weather. He often stopped indoors for two or three weeks at a time in the winter.

“My dear boy,” he replied, “I don’t object to anything about you at present; I really find you the only satisfactory spot in a—a satisfactory life. There is only one thing I should object to, and that is if you made a fool of yourself. Don’t do that, Tom. Many people when they make fools of themselves think that they are being original, whereas they are doing what nine-tenths of the human race has done since the beginning of the world—more than nine-tenths, probably. Adam and Eve both made fools of themselves, so did Cain and Abel—Abel particularly. And a sculptor has such unlimited opportunities for making a fool of himself.”

“In what way?” asked Tom.

“Falling in love with his models, or still worse, marrying them. If you are going to the devil, go to him like a gentleman. Then, sculptors often wear long hair, and Liberty fabric ties, with gold rings round them. I knew a sculptor once who wore a cameo ring. If you wear a cameo ring I shall cut my throat.”

“Oh, I shan’t do any of those things,” said Tom confidently.

“No, I think it is most probable that you won’t, otherwise I should make objections to your being a sculptor. But you can’t tell. You haven’t had many opportunities yet.”

“One can make a fool of one’s self at Cambridge if it comes to that,” said Tom.

“No, not very easily. Public opinion is against it, whereas in most places the fools themselves constitute public opinion. I’m glad of it, though it is only putting off the evil days a little longer. When I was at Cambridge, boys made fools of themselves earlier than they do now. For instance, people get drunk much less. It’s a change for the better, I suppose. But I don’t know that this generation will have gone through less dirt when they are forty, than we did. There comes a time to every one when they must decide definitely whether they are going to make fools of themselves or not. I’ve got very strong views about morality.”

His clever, wrinkled old face beamed with amusement.

“Morality is just a synonym for wisdom,” he went on, “and immorality is folly. I don’t know anything about the religious side of it all. I leave that to others, professionals. But I know a little about folly. It’s quite the worst investment you can make.”

“I don’t know that I ever thought about it at all,” said Tom frankly; “I don’t mean to be a brute if I can help it.”

“There are no such things as brutes,” said his father; “there are only wise men and fools—chiefly fools. Every man has to settle the question for himself as to which he will be: no one goes through life scot-free of the necessity of fighting inclinations. I haven’t ever talked to you before about it, because it is no use giving advice to young men, and the worst thing of all is to tell them to think about such things. You have to think about it when your time comes; till then it’s best not to know it. The best preparation is to lead a healthy life, and think about cricket, not to read White Cross tracts and go to purity meetings.”

Tom rose from his chair and knocked out the ashes of his pipe against the chimney-piece.

“I think you’re wrong, father,” he said; “if one has an aim in life, everything gives way to that. If one has principles, one cannot disregard them.”

“Sometimes principles interfere with interests,” remarked Mr. Carlingford.

Tom laughed.

“Idle men are the vicious men,” he said.

“I haven’t done a stroke of work for ten years,” remarked his father with amusement. “All the same, I haven’t been idle. I find plenty to do in watching other people. But there is one piece of advice I would really like to give you. If you find you fall in love with any unsuitable young person—a model probably—send her about her business. If it’s too far gone for that, cut her throat—it is probably her fault—she probably wanted you to fall in love with her, and if you see any objection to that, cut mine, or cut your own. Perhaps your own is best. It is unpleasant, no doubt, for the moment, but that is better than wishing every moment for the rest of your life that you had done it.”

“But one can always cut one’s throat. Besides, isn’t that making a fool of one’s self?”

“Not at all: it is the consequence of having made a fool of one’s self.”

Tom frowned.

“Ah, I don’t like people talking about consequences. That is the talk of cowards.”

His father laughed.

“Never mind me, Tom,” he said; “I don’t expect you to agree with me. I am a vicious coward, am I not?”

“What I mean is, that you can make the best or the worst of a bad job,” said Tom. “When people talk of consequences, they seem to mean the worst consequences. When a man has made a mistake, it is stupid of him to sit down and say, ‘Well, that is done; now for the consequences.’ There is almost always a choice of consequences.”

“Very often there are no consequences,” remarked his father. “I don’t think I ever did anything which had any consequences. But then, I never remember doing anything either, except making some money. When are you going to marry, Tom?” he asked suddenly.

Tom looked startled.

“When I fall in love, I suppose,” he said roundly.

“That’s a man’s answer. Well, my boy, I’m going to bed. You go to Cambridge to-morrow, don’t you? Are you going to do well in your Tripos?”

“I should think it’s very unlikely,” said Tom. “It seems that I’m a fool.”

“That’s no reason why you shouldn’t do well.”

“Then it seems that I’m the wrong sort of fool.”

Mr. Carlingford lighted his candle.

“That is very likely. Don’t trouble to do well on my account. I really don’t care the least what you do.”

“I shan’t trouble to do well on my own,” said Tom, laughing. “We had better prepare for failure.”

It was very evident in the course of the next term that Tom was extremely unlikely to do well on anybody’s account. The wine of his passion had begun to ferment in his brain, and he lounged his mornings away sometimes in the cast museum, sometimes in his room over a bushel of sculptor’s clay. At other times he had fits of complete idleness. He would get up late, perhaps go to a lecture, then stroll up to the tennis court, and play till lunch-time. In the afternoon he would play football, and sit talking over tea till Hall time, and after Hall play whist till bed-time. Markham, who was busy writing a dissertation for his Fellowship, had not time to look after him at all, and those in authority gave him up as a bad job. Tom regarded his own position as an excellent example of a man determining the consequences of his acts.

“I haven’t done any work for weeks,” he said to Markham one day, “and I ought to be in hot water. As a matter of fact, I am not, because I make up for it by cordially agreeing with all that they say to me, and never being out after twelve.”

“Don’t you think you are behaving rather idiotically?” asked Markham. “You seem to be rather proud of doing no work. It’s very easy; any one can do it.”

“Yes, I know it’s very easy,” said Tom, who was in an exasperating mood, “that’s why I do it. At the same time, any one can’t do it. You couldn’t, for example.”

“I hope I should never wish to try.”

“My dear Ted, you are incapable of wishing to try. It isn’t in you. It’s not so easy to be idle—though I said it was just now, because I wanted to make you angry—you must have a great deal to think about in order to be idle. If you don’t do something, you must be something, and that requires thought.”

“May I ask what you are being just now?”

“You shouldn’t interrupt, Ted. I was going to say that of course there are some people, who neither do or are anything, but they are idiots. I’m not that sort of idiot myself; just now I am being an artist.”

“I don’t doubt it, but what reason have I for believing it?”

“Oh, none at all,” said Tom, “but you asked me. I am meditating. I shall do the better for this some day.”

Markham made an impatient movement in his chair.

“Excuse my saying that I want to go on with my work.”

Tom laughed.

“Poor, dear old Ted, how you must loathe me! You can’t understand my doing nothing any more than I can understand your doing so much. Is your work of such vital importance? What does it all come to?”

“You’ve asked that before,” remarked Ted.

“Yes, and you’ve never answered it. I can understand a man doing archæology; there’s some human interest in that. I like to know what sort of earrings the Greek women used to wear. Oh, Ted, do you know the sepulchral reliefs from Athens? there’s a cast of one in the Museum. It’s wonderful. I shall do one to you when you die.”

“I wish you would go to your room, and get on with it.”

“Is the deliberative subjunctive going to kill you so soon as that? Well, I’ve often warned you. Good-bye, Teddy. You’re not sociable this morning.”

Tom departed, whistling loudly, and out of tune.

The Fellowship elections took place in March, and as the days drew near, Markham, finding himself unable to work, and fretting because he could not, very wisely determined to go away from Cambridge for the last week, having made Tom promise to telegraph the result to him. Tom was just returning from the telegraph office, having performed what was a thoroughly pleasing and satisfactory duty, and was crossing the court in the gathering dusk, when he saw a figure standing on the path near the Hall, where the announcement was posted. A sociable curiosity made him tack off a little and see who it was, and to his astonishment he found Markham standing there.

“Why, Teddy, I’ve just telegraphed to you!” he cried.

Markham turned round to him.

“Quick! tell me quick!” he said.

“You may walk across the grass,” said Tom solemnly; this being one of the Fellows’ privileges “And you may set to work to become a fossil as soon as you please. Well, I congratulate you, I suppose, though I’m not sure it’s the best thing for you.”

Markham caught hold of Tom’s arm.

“I think,” he said, very slowly and deliberately, “I think I’ve been making a fool of myself. This morning I found I couldn’t stop away, and I came back about a quarter of an hour ago. Since then I have been standing here, not daring to go in and see. Tom, I’m going to chapel.”

It was two or three days after this that the two were walking down to the Pitt on Sunday evening. On their way they passed one of the mission-rooms in the town, and the street was almost blocked by a crowd all trying to get in. Tom, who was never so happy as in a mass of surging humanity, insisted on mingling with them and seeing what was going on. Markham tried to dissuade him, but failed, and after a good deal of pushing he succeeded in getting inside.

It was a Revivalist meeting full to overflowing; the room was hung with flaring banners, lit with blazing gas-standards, and warm condensed moisture shone on the walls. Tom looked with wonder and slight disgust towards the platform, where a short, stumpy man with a chin beard was addressing the people. He was describing his own conversion, which transformed him, according to his own account, from a swindling greengrocer into one of the saved. This happy change had also been accompanied with a great improvement in the greengrocery business. Instead of giving short weight and being always in debt, he took to giving full measure and speedily opened an account at a savings bank. He also mentioned that he became a teetotaler at the same time, though the more obvious connection between this fact and the incident of the savings bank did not seem to occur either to him or to his audience. All these sumptuous results were a direct effect of grace.

Tom listened for some minutes with amusement struggling with disgust, until the preacher in a sudden burst of gratitude gave out a hymn of the most militant order, and packed solidly with concrete images of abstract ideas. A young woman in a large poke bonnet was busy thrusting hymn-books into the hands of the congregation, and gave one to Tom. The band struck up a tune expressive of the liveliest devotion, and the congregation joined at the top of their voices.

They were in the middle of the second verse, when a sudden stir ran through the crowd, and from the middle of the hall there ran up to the platform a young woman, smartly—over-smartly—dressed, who burst into a loud fit of hysterical crying, and cried out that she was saved. The hymn was stopped at once, and the preacher led her aside while the congregation waited. In a few moments he led her back to the front of the platform, and gave out another hymn:—

“There were ninety-and-nine that safely lay.”

Tom’s sense of amusement was gone—a frown gathered on his forehead. What on earth did it all mean? It was clear what sort of a girl it was who had “stormed the gate of Heaven,” as the preacher expressed it—he had often noticed her in the streets—and now she was—what? How was she suddenly different from what she was before? Had her previous life been blotted out? What was the change, what did it mean? It could have been no easy thing to make an exhibition of one’s self like that; and where was the driving power? He began to be almost afraid. And before the hymn was finished the same thing happened again, this time to an elderly, respectable-looking man, who delivered a short speech to the congregation with tears streaming down his face. There was some strange force abroad, and Tom did not like it at all. He was desperately afraid of making a fool of himself, and he remembered his father’s warnings, though they were delivered in a very different sense. The vulgarity, the loudness of the whole proceedings were still very present to him, but he felt that he was in the presence of some force, hysterical perhaps, or perhaps only that force which does exist in enthusiastic crowds, of the nature of which he was absolutely ignorant. For aught he knew it might lay its hands on him next. So he resorted to the most obvious way out of it, and pushing through the crowd, he left the room.

Late that night he strolled into Markham’s room, as the latter was just thinking that it was time to go to bed, and proceeded to deliver himself of his impressions at length.

“It made me confoundedly uncomfortable,” he commented, after giving a full account of what had taken place. “I didn’t half like it, Teddy; I never saw anything like it before, and it was so much more real than I expected. What do you suppose that girl felt, or that man either? How can the singing of a hymn change the whole moral character? It must be hysterical. That’s why I went away; I was afraid of becoming hysterical too. Think how flat one would feel the next morning. And oh! the awful commonness of it all. The elect greengrocer was the scrubbiest sort of brute. Fancy announcing publicly that you were saved! Surely, that is the one thing in the world one would be reticent about. What does it all mean, Teddy?”

Markham felt the natural reserve which almost all young men feel in talking of such subjects, and Tom’s sudden curiosity about it surprised him. It was like Tom to mix with any crowd to see what was going forward, but it was so unlike him to have waited a single moment after seeing what it was, that Ted had waited in the street for him, expecting him to appear again every moment, and had eventually gone on to the Pitt, in a puzzled frame of mind.

“I don’t exactly know, Tom,” he said, after a pause. “I believe that that sort of conversion, as they call it, often has permanent effects. I think it quite conceivable that the greengrocer will continue to give full measure.”

“But about the savings bank!” burst out Tom; “how can that have anything to do with it?”

“You would put it differently, of course: you would say, ‘Honesty is the best policy.’”

“Possibly I should. At any rate, if one can account intelligibly for a thing it is better to do so, than to try to account for it fallaciously.”

Markham frowned.

“We’ve never talked of this kind of thing before,” he said tentatively. “I haven’t the remotest idea what your religion is, or, indeed, if you’ve got any.”

“That’s exactly what I’ve been thinking to myself all the evening,” remarked Tom. “I don’t know myself; I was only conscious that I felt no kind of sympathy with those people. I was amused and disgusted, and then I was frightened.”

“I wish you had stopped,” said Markham, suddenly.

“Why on earth? Do you really think it would have done me any good to have been suddenly ‘taken’ as those people were? I suppose you will say I am a Pharisee—but what good would it have done me? What should I not do that I do now, or what should I do that I do not do? Early chapels, I suppose——”

“Ah, don’t!” said Markham, with sudden earnestness. “Those things may mean nothing to you, but they do to others—and among others to me.”

Tom stared in perplexity.

“To you—do you believe in that sort of conversion? Do you think that something can happen to you suddenly like that which changes you?”

“I can’t help believing it. How can I say that such things do not happen? I stake my life on such possibilities.”

“The whole thing seems so irrational to me,” said Tom. “In anything else, a man’s life is not changed by a little thing of that sort. And then the banking account——”

“Well, take an instance in your own line,” said Markham. “Can’t you imagine a modern artist who looks at a Raphael for the first time becoming a convert to that style of art?”

“That’s quite different,” said Tom. “These people have probably been brought up in these beliefs; the idea is not a new one to them. No doubt it came home with more force at such a moment. It is like a man who had been looking at Raphaels all his life, and caring nothing for them, being suddenly convinced by one of them. That doesn’t seem to me likely.”

“You may be right, I can’t say, for you know more of the subject than I. But what right have you to say that a thing doesn’t seem likely in a matter of which, as you said, you know nothing?”

“That’s true,” said Tom, “I do know nothing of it. But who does?”

“The probability is, that people who have thought about it know more than those who haven’t.”

Tom got up, and began to walk up and down the room.

“Well, I want to know, but how can I? If I didn’t feel an interest in it, I shouldn’t have come to talk about it. But I am altogether at sea. I wasn’t brought up in a religious household. My father never speaks of such things. At school I had to read the Bible, chiefly the Acts, like any other school lesson. I was confirmed as a matter of course. If you are not religiously minded, how can you become religious? If a man is not literary, you don’t expect him to feel any interest in books.”

“But it’s a defect that he doesn’t.”

“Yes, because he naturally moves among people who do,” said Tom, “and he necessarily feels out of it. But though you move among religious people you don’t feel out of it, because their religion does not come into their lives. I suppose you would call my father an Atheist, but you wouldn’t know it, unless you inferred it from the fact that he doesn’t go to church on Sundays, and that we don’t have family prayers. How is it possible for me to feel such things? Perhaps—you see I never knew my mother, she died when I was a baby——”

“Were you not brought up to believe anything?”

“My nurse taught me to say my prayers. On cold evenings I used to ask if I might say them in bed, and I always got dropped on for it. It was considered a form of profanity. I never understood why. And when the age for nurses ceased, my prayers ceased also. I want to know where the difference between me and religious people comes in. A large number of religious people lose their tempers oftener than I do, because I was born with a better temper than they. You read of clergymen being convicted of theft. I never was, because I never stole anything. Gentlemen don’t do such things. It seems to me that we both agree with a certain code of morality for different reasons.”

“Did it never occur to you to wonder why you existed, or how you existed, or what was the object of your existence at all?”

Tom looked at him straight in the face.

“No, never. What good would it do me to puzzle my head about such things even if it had occurred to me? Here I am; how or why I have no means of telling. But I mean to make other people know why I existed; one can’t do more than that. I am going to be an artist.”

Markham felt the hopelessness of making Tom understand. It was like describing colours to a blind man; for himself he had been brought up in a childlike faith, and he was childlike still. His life had been sheltered, nursed in traditions, and when it was transplanted to the outer air, it was a sapling capable of striking roots, and standing by itself. It had never known what the drenching showers of autumn, or the winds of winter were, till it was capable, not exactly of despising them, but of being unconscious of them. If Tom was blind, he was blind, too, in another sense.

There was a long silence. Tom had halted in his walk by the chimney-piece, and was poking a paper spill down his pipe stem. Markham was sitting at the table, puzzled and helpless. It was a couple of minutes perhaps before Tom spoke. Then he spoke decidedly.

“I’m not going to bother about it,” he said. “I don’t understand what it all means, but I don’t understand what most things mean. If it is a big thing, you may be sure that there are many ways of getting at it. One man can’t see all the way round a big thing. You are at one side of it, Ted, perhaps I am nowhere; but then, again, I may be at the other side of it. I may be meant to come to it by roads you can never guess of. If I am meant to know it, I shall know it some time. By-the-by, we play tennis at ten to-morrow.”

“You’ve got a lecture at ten,” said Markham.

“Many things may happen at ten,” said Tom “but the probability is in favour of only one thing happening. I don’t think the lecture has supreme rights. However, if it has, you won’t get a game.”

“Oh, but you promised you’d play!” said Markham unwisely.

“I can’t go back on that,” said Tom. “I never promised to go to a lecture. You shall give me breakfast at nine—or perhaps a little after nine. Let’s call it nine-ish.”

CHAPTER V.

Maud Wrexham was sitting in her mother’s room one morning, towards the end of July, after breakfast, telling Lady Chatham her engagements for the day. This piece of ritual was daily and invariable, and her mother spent the succeeding three-quarters of an hour in trying “to work things in,” as she called it—in other words, to manage that one carriage should drop two people in different parts of London, and call for them both again at the hour they wanted. These manœuvres usually ended in both parties concerned taking hansoms, after waiting a considerable time for the carriage to pick them up, and driving home separately, while the empty carriage, with the coachman, who was always sceptical about such arrangements, returned home gloomily about half an hour later.

“I think I shall go to Victoria and meet Arthur,” Maud was just saying; “he will catch the first boat from Calais, and his train gets in about five.”

“Dear Arthur!” exclaimed Lady Chatham with effusion, “I hope he won’t be dreadfully relaxed. Athens is so relaxing; I wish he could have stopped at Berlin.”

Arthur Wrexham had just spent his first year at Athens, as third Secretary to the Legation, and was coming home for two months’ leave.

“He’ll have a lot of luggage, mother,” went on Maud; “you’d far better let me take a hansom, and then he and I can come back in one, and send his luggage by a four-wheeler.”

Lady Chatham examined her engagement-book with avidity.

“No, Maud, it’s the easiest thing in the world. What a coincidence! I’ve got to pick your father up at Victoria Mansions at a quarter-past five. I will drop you at Victoria, and then go on. If we are there by ten minutes past, it will do perfectly; the boat is sure to be late.”

“It will be rather stupid if I miss him,” said Maud.

“You’ll be in plenty of time—or if you like, I will start five minutes earlier, and go round to see—no, I can’t do that. Then, as you say, you can take a hansom. No, you needn’t do that. If I take the landau we can all come back together. Five minutes for getting to Victoria Mansions, and five minutes back. He’ll take ten minutes getting his luggage out. How much luggage will he have?”

“I don’t really know.”

“Because we might take the lighter things—I needn’t take a footman—and send the heavier ones home by Carter and Paterson.”

“I think it would be safer to get a cab, wouldn’t it?”

“I’ll think about it, and tell you at lunch. Dear Arthur! Well, what else are you going to do?”

“We’re going to the Ramsdens’ dance this evening, and dining there first.”

“Then the other carriage can take us, and if Arthur cares to go to the dance—they didn’t know he’d be back, but I’m sure they want him to come—Lady Ramsden told me so, if he was back by any chance—it can come back here, and take him on again at ten. Then you and I will come back in it, when you’ve had enough, and if Arthur wants to stop, I’m afraid he must find his own way back. Is that all?”

“I’m lunching with the Cornishes.”

“Well, then, I’ll leave a note for you about Arthur’s luggage, as I shan’t see you at lunch. Where do the Cornishes live?”

“In Pont Street.”

“Then it’s the most convenient thing in the world. I’m going to my dentist at half-past twelve, and I shall be back by two. Then the carriage can take you on at once.”

“They lunch at two, I’m afraid, mother.”

“Well, dear, you’ll only be a few minutes late. It will save you the bother of taking a hansom, or walking.”

“Oh, never mind! I shall be out, I expect, and shall go there straight.”

“Where are you going?”

“Oh, shopping.”

“Well, then, I might drop you on my way to the dentist’s wherever you liked. If you will be ready at twelve I will take you. Or five minutes to twelve, if you are going out of my way.”

Maud got up.

“No, start at twelve as you intended, and if I’m in, and ready, I’ll come with you. Don’t wait for me, mother.”

“If you’d only tell me exactly where you want to go, and when, Maud, I’ve no doubt I could work it in.”

“I’ve got to go to Houghton and Gunn’s first.”

“Very well, then,” said her mother, triumphantly, “nothing can be simpler. I drop you there, and go to the dentist’s. Then I send the carriage back for you, and you do anything else you want, and come back to the dentist’s at half-past one. Then we drive straight to Pont Street, and I drop you again, and go home.”

Maud’s chief object at this moment, it must be confessed, was to get out of the room. So she assented with fervour.

“That’s beautiful, mother. How clever of you to work it all in!”

Lady Chatham heaved a sigh of well-earned satisfaction. “Yes, I think everything is provided for. Ring the bell, darling, will you? I must send word to the stables at once.”

Lady Chatham felt that she had really deserved a painless visit to the dentist. She was always regretting that her time was so dreadfully taken up with little things, and that she never could do anything she really wanted to do, though what that was is quite unknown. It is to be suspected that in addition to her daily arrangements, she spent much time in making plans for Maud’s future, which included far more than the ordinary maternally matrimonial plans include. She intended, for instance, to send her out to Athens for a few months during the winter, where she would live with her brother, and see a little foreign life. Foreign life, she considered, was something very mysterious, but very broadening in its effects on the human mind. The fact that you no longer had meat breakfast at half-past nine, and lunch at two, but café au lait at eight and déjeûner at twelve or half-past, was apparently the door to whole vistas of widening experiences. Breakfast at half-past nine and lunch at two were parts of the organism of life, and the substitution of other hours instead of those was a change the importance of which could not be overlooked. She had spent six months in Rome when she was a girl, with an uncle, who was ambassador there, and she always looked back to that six months as having been something very revolutionary and startling. It had made, she often said, the whole difference to her.

To-day, however, the arrangements, owing to a distinct intervention of Providence, who roughened the seas, and made the train late, went off more satisfactorily than usual, and as they drove to the Ramsdens in the evening, Lady Chatham felt that the dentist really had hurt her more than he should have been allowed to do, and hoped that she would have a pleasant dinner to make up for it.

The Ramsdens lived in one of the few houses in London which do not remind one of barracks, and Lady Ramsden’s parties had the reputation, among those who were asked, of being very smart, while those who were not considered her a pushing woman. Four or five times a year her dinners had a little paragraph all to themselves in the Morning Post, beginning with a Royal Highness and ending with Colonels in attendance, on the page that announced the movements of nations and the quarrels of kings. Lady Ramsden always snipped these out, and pasted them in an extract book. There was a certain monotony about them, but you cannot have too much of a good thing. But this was not one of her really smart parties; originally it was to have been, but the Highness had been unable to come, and she had to have recourse, not only to mere Honourables, but even a plain Mr., in the shape of Tom Carlingford.

Tom had already arrived when Lady Chatham got there, and Maud was quite surprised to find how glad she was to see him again. Apparently, her mission of being nice to people had been successful in this instance, for he was evidently equally glad to see her. He took her in to dinner, and as Tom’s custom was, began exactly where they had left off.

“I’m going out to Greece in October,” he was saying. “I’ve finished with Cambridge.”

“I remember your telling me you were going out,” said Maud. “I’m going too; did you know that? My brother is at the Legation there.”

“Oh, but how nice!” said Tom. “Are you going soon?”

“Well, about the beginning of December, for a month or two. You’ll see my brother to-night. He’s coming to the dance afterwards. Have you taken your degree? By the way, I saw that your friend Mr. Markham had got a Fellowship. I was so pleased. I nearly wrote to congratulate him.”

“Why didn’t you quite?” asked Tom.

“Surely it was sufficiently shocking that I nearly did. Are you going to get a Fellowship too?”

Tom grinned.

“Well, it’s not imminent.”

“Why, aren’t you ambitious? It’s a pity for a man not to be ambitious.”

“My ambitions don’t lie in those lines. Besides, I’m a fool. Every one has told me so scores of times.”

Later on in the evening the two were sitting out in a charming little courtyard in the centre of the house, open to the air, and walled with banks of flowers. The place was lit up by small electric lights among the flowers, and the air was deliciously cool and dim after the hot glare of the ball-room. The steady hum of a London night came to them clearly in the stillness, that noise of busy people, which never is quiet. The place was nearly deserted, and Maud was fanning herself lazily.

“There, do you hear it?” she said; “that’s the noise I love. I like to know that I am in the middle of millions of people.”

Tom smiled.

“Ah! you like it too, do you?” he said. “It’s the finest thing in the world. But I always want to get at it, to make its heart beat quicker or slower as I wish. That’s a modest ambition, isn’t it?”

Maud stopped fanning herself, and dropped her hands into her lap.

“Yes; how is one to do it? I’m going to do it too, you know. We shall have to send word to each other whether its heart is to go quick or slow, else there will be trouble. I feel so dreadfully small in London. I suppose it is good for one, but it’s very unpleasant.”

“No, it’s not good for one, except that if you know you are small, you are already half-way to being big,” said Tom. “At any rate, one can never be big without the consciousness of being small.”

Maud sat still for a moment, saying nothing.

“Why did you care nothing about what you did at Cambridge, then?” she asked. “Surely you could have made a beginning there.”

“I got a third in my Tripos,” remarked Tom. “Have you ever done Greek grammar, or Thucydides?”

“No, never; why?”

“It’s the sort of thing a parrot could be taught to do.”

“And because you are not a parrot, they couldn’t teach you. Is that it?”

Tom laughed.

“Well, you needn’t believe it unless you like, but I believe I could have done well if I had wanted to enough. I really didn’t want to. There’s not time for that sort of thing.”

“What did you do instead?”

“I enjoyed myself. I’ve had my holiday, and now I’m going to work. Here’s your brother coming to look for you.”

Arthur Wrexham was a slight, delicate-looking man, who apparently suffered from extreme languor; he was very well dressed, and had weak blue eyes, which looked only a quarter awake. He had already roused Tom’s wrath by confessing, in answer to certain questions, that he had never been into any of the museums.

“There’s such a lot to do, you know,” he explained. “One has to go to the Legation every day to see if there are any letters to be written, and then one has to take some exercise, you know, and go out to dinner. Then there are cigarettes to smoke.”

“Perhaps you don’t care about art?” Tom had said charitably.

“Oh dear, yes, I’m devoted to it! I mean to let all the museums burst upon me some day.”

“They won’t burst upon you unless you go there,” Tom had replied.

Just now, Arthur was peculiarly gentle and piano; he dangled his hands weakly before him, and wore an expression of appreciative languor.

“Oh, here you are!” he said. “I wish you’d come home, Maud. I think I shall go, in any case. Do you think there’s a hansom about anywhere?”

Maud laughed.

“Poor dear, shall I go and call one for you?”

“I suppose there’s sure to be one somewhere in the street, isn’t there? Delightful party it’s been, hasn’t it? No, I haven’t danced, but it’s so nice to be in London again. I shall go and sit in the Park to-morrow, on a little civilized green chair. There are no green chairs in Athens, you know, and no parks either. It really is a barbarous place; I can’t think why you want to go there, Maud.”

“Why don’t you take a little civilized green chair with you, Arthur,” she said, “and put it in the garden? That would do for the park.”

“Yes, it’s so good of you to suggest that; but it wouldn’t do at all. It’s not only the little green chair, it’s the civilization generally, and the grey sky, and sirloins of beef one wants.”

“I thought you hated beef,” said Maud. “I’m sure I’ve heard you say that it was barbarous food.”

“Oh yes, I know it is; but I like to know that it’s there. I don’t want to eat it, but there always ought to be some on the sideboard. Well, won’t you come, Maud?”

“No, I’m not coming yet.”

Tom grew exasperated.

“Can’t you find your way home alone?” he asked.

Arthur Wrexham looked at him for a moment with mild and slightly piteous surprise.

“Oh yes, I shall be all right,” he said, “if I can only get a hansom! I suppose there’s a man who will call a hansom for me if I give him a shilling. Good night, Maud.”

He went very quietly away, bestowing a nod and a tired smile on Tom.

“It’s so funny that he should be my brother,” said Maud, when he was out of hearing; “and all he wants to do is to read little French books, and sit in the Park, and have tea on the terrace of the House of Commons. I wonder he didn’t mention that.”

“I dare say he’ll do it in a day or two, when he gets less tired,” said Tom; “he evidently means to begin gently.”

Maud drew on her gloves again.

“Here’s my partner coming to look for me,” she said. “I must go. Mind you come and see us. You are in London for a time, are you not?”

“Oh yes, till the end of July, or nearly. I don’t suppose I ever spent a whole week in London before, but father has at last consented to take a house for a couple of months. He even came to Henley this year, though I must say he was much bored by it, and almost perfectly silent, except once when a lot of dabchicks came swimming round, and he looked up and said, ‘The very dabchicks come about me unawares, making mouths at me.’ He likes sitting in the Park, too, and observing the weaknesses of the human race.”

“He must have his hands full. Doesn’t he observe their strong points as well?”

“No, I don’t think he does,” said Tom. “He likes them weak.”

Tom, fool though he might be, was wise enough to know that there are a great many interesting things to see in London, and had deliberately set himself to see them, with the result that in two or three weeks he knew more about the town than most Englishmen, and nearly as much as most Americans. Though he meant to specialize in sculpture, he had an “all-round eye,” as the saying is, and a great power of reducing what he saw to mental pictures and little dramatic vignettes, and he found food for imagination scattered broadcast. Its extraordinary crude contrasts struck him most, and he often went rather early to theatres or to the opera, in order to stand for a few minutes at the street corner and watch the upper classes going to have their emotions tickled, while the grimy crowd round them hustled and pushed along in a never-ending stream. On one of these occasions a sturdy beggar asked him for money, and Tom, seized by a sudden impulse, showed him half-a-sovereign and asked him what he would do with it if he gave it him. The man’s eyes glistened, and he looked Tom full in the face.

“I should be drunk for a week, sir,” he said.

Tom broke into a roar of appreciative laughter, and gave it him.

The action was wholly indefensible from every point of view, but it was thoroughly characteristic. Love of life, in any form and in any guise, was stronger in him than the whole world beside. Anything which gave the genuine ring of life, whether made of gold or the basest of alloys, was worth the most valuable metals if they had no currency.

At other times he would go to the British Museum, which is quite worth a visit, and look at the Elgin marbles till his head ached. But he usually came away feeling rather helpless and dispirited. There was often a large number of young men and women copying them in chalks or oils, and Tom had sudden revulsions of feelings when he gazed at these. There was one girl in particular, with a frizzy fringe of seaweed-coloured hair and spectacles, who was making an admirable copy of the Olympos figure. She was dressed in a velveteen body, rather short in the sleeves, a badly cut skirt of green cloth, and wore very high-heeled shoes of antique patent leather. Somehow the combination of such an artist with such a subject confirmed the impression he had received at Cambridge when looking at the Discobolus figure. The thing was no longer possible. Beautiful nude youths did not now sit on lion-skins at street-corners, any more than Queen Victoria ate Homeric meals like Agamemnon. The grand style was obsolete. And on such occasions Tom would leave the Elgin room with a sigh. If the world was to be conquered it must be conquered with modern weapons of war; no amount of spears and slings would be a match for Martini rifles, field-guns, and cordite. Spears and slings were more beautiful, no doubt, but they were out of date. Just now that meant a good deal to Tom.

But if the Elgin marbles were out of date, still more out of date was Cambridge with its deliberative subjunctives. He thought with something like horror of the dull steady life there; of the long mornings when decorous isolation was observed throughout the college; when men sat with dictionaries and notebooks in front of them, and discreetly analysed Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian war. That was more hopelessly obsolete than the Elgin marbles, for the latter were in the vanguard of their times, whereas Cambridge was painfully crawling back to times long past, and thinking throughout the tedious process that it was in the forefront of thought and advancement. It was the classical branches of that eminent university which seemed to him so woefully retrograde in their tendencies—for the medical, scientific, and even mathematical schools he felt, if not sympathy, at any rate no impatient condolence. “And then they marched two parasangs and came to the River Amaspis ... and after having dinner there and marching two more parasangs, they encamped for the night.” The old sentences came back to him, as a Wagnerian may remember bars of Donizetti or Rossini heard in the unregenerate days.

And Markham? Markham came up to town for a few days in July, and worked at manuscripts in the British Museum. He was collating texts of an obscure Greek author, and explaining to a limited section of society how certain glosses crept in. It appeared that the copyist of the thirteenth century had taken unwarrantable liberties with the text, and that he had also frequently copied a word into a line he was writing, either from the preceding or the subsequent line, and this naturally led to a great deal of unnecessary confusion. One of the most vital results of this carelessness, as it appeared to Tom, lay in the fact that a sensible man like Markham should be spending the best years of his life in determining where this deplorable scribe had not taken the trouble to copy exactly what lay before him. And as no earlier copy of the work was extant, there was a field for the most various and lively conjectures, the truth of which would for ever remain in pleasing uncertainty. Markham, of course, was staying with Tom, and one evening the latter waxed quite hot on the subject, to his father’s great amusement.

“Did I tell you of that beggar I gave half a sovereign to one night?” he asked. “Well, I consider him to be infinitely your superior. When the Judgment day comes, he will know much more about his fellow-men than you ever will, and, according to all creeds, he will be in a better position than you when the accounts are settled.”

“If you mean that to get drunk for a week is knowing about your fellow-men,” said Markham, “I agree with you. But that sort of knowledge doesn’t seem to me worth much.”

“Oh, Teddy, I really wish you would get drunk once or twice, or be disreputable in some way! It would be the making of you. You are without charity; you don’t even know what it means. You have never known what it is to make allowances for anybody.”

“On the contrary, I am employed just now in making allowances for my thirteenth-century copyist, whom you gird at so.”

“No, you don’t make allowances for him in the least,” said Tom; “you note down in a cold critical way just where he goes obviously wrong. You gloat over his mistakes because they enable you to make brilliant—I suppose you are brilliant—guesses at what he should have written. You don’t think of the poor old man having to copy out dull Greek iambics by the yard, and getting very sleepy over the process. There would be some interest in that; what you do is to rob everything of all the human interest it ever possessed.”

Mr. Carlingford had spent his life from the age of fourteen to fifty-eight in learning how to acquire money and in proceeding to do so, and had existed entirely for the business house which he had founded and raised to an important and safe position. But his work had never been a passion to him, and at the latter age he had retired, leaving the management of affairs in the hands of his old partner and his son, who had a few years afterwards been also taken into the business. Mr. Carlingford on retiring had not left his capital merely as a deposit in the business, but remained a partner, though he took no part whatever in the management of the affairs. In his elder partner he felt as much confidence as it was in his nature to feel towards any one, and as, since his retiring, his income had shown no signs of falling off, his confidence had rapidly flowered into a total indifference to all such concerns. His fortune, in fact, was sufficiently large to enable him to feel a profound contempt for money, bred from familiarity with it, and he did not put the slightest opposition in the way of Tom becoming a sculptor or adopting any profession, except that of a clergyman, however unremunerative.

Tom very soon got known and even discussed in a certain section of London society. He was extremely presentable, he made himself uniformly agreeable, except to Markham, and he had the incidental advantage of being the heir of an exceedingly rich man. Lady Chatham in the intervals of arranging about carriages congratulated herself on having previously settled for Maud to go out with her brother to Athens that winter. She even went so far as to allude to it once to her husband, who always saw the darker side of any scheme.

“Well, my dear, I think it very rash of you to encourage their intimacy,” he said; “Mr. Carlingford has no land, and even land is worth nothing now.”

Lady Chatham was rather horror-struck at this very unveiled way of stating the objection to a subject she had introduced so cautiously.

“Tom Carlingford is just as nice as he can be,” she replied, “and very well connected, and what investments and land have to do with the question, Chatham, I really don’t know.”

“But you were saying only the other day that you hoped Maud would marry well.”

“I have my only daughter’s real advantage at heart, and that only,” she replied with finality.

Lord Chatham overlooked the finality, and continued—

“Then did you only mean that you hoped she would marry a nice man, when you said you hoped she would marry well?”

“Of course it is an advantage to marry a man who can keep her in boots and gloves,” said Lady Chatham, stung into innocuous sarcasm.

“Oh, well, I dare say Tom Carlingford could do that, even if his father’s business smashed altogether. Mind you send the carriage back for me punctually, dear; I’ve got another meeting to go to after the House, and if it isn’t ready I shall have to take a cab, and the carriage perhaps will wait half an hour or more, and we shall be late for dinner.”

CHAPTER VI.

Tom had spent the latter part of the summer and the earlier autumn at a sculptor’s studio in Paris, and arrived at Athens in a decade of summer November days. The fogs and frosts had laid a hand on Paris before he left, and the new heaven and the new earth looked very fair as his ship steamed slowly into the Piræus just before sunrise. The violet crown of mountains round Athens lay in dewy silence waiting for the dawn, and even in the dim half light the air was full of southern colour. He stood on the deck until the sun had shot up above Pentelicus, and was joined by Arthur Wrexham, who had secured a month’s extra leave, on a vague plea of debility.

“It’s so delicious to be in these classic waters again,” said that diplomatist. “England had become quite unbearably foggy. Cook’s man will get us a boat.”

“What’s that mountain?” asked Tom peremptorily—“that one, just where the sun has risen.”

Arthur Wrexham looked vaguely in the direction of the sun.

“Oh, it’s Hymettus, I think, but I’m not sure. I’ve no head for these barbarous names. Have you got all your things together? Do you see Cook’s man anywhere? They all talk Greek here.”

A medley of boats full of picturesque Southerners was waiting below, offering to take any one on shore at a ridiculously low figure, and in wholly unintelligible language.

“It’s no use waiting for Cook’s man,” said Tom; “let’s get one of these brown ruffians to take us ashore.”

“If you’ll talk to him, and tell him we will only pay a fifth part of what he wants, we will,” said Arthur Wrexham, “but I can’t understand them.”

Tom found his way up to the Acropolis during the morning, and suspended judgment. The whole thing was so transcendently beautiful that he could not endorse his own prophecies that it would be obsolete, and since obsolete, disappointing. He planted himself on the Propylæa steps for half an hour, and looked out from between a frame of marble pillars stained to the richest orange with wind and rain over the Attic plain, across the sea towards Salamis and Ægina. The sky, one blue, touched another blue on the horizon, and melted the edges of capes and mountains.

To the right, across the grey-green olive grove far below, rose the swelling mass of Parnes, fringed with pine woods, and a white village nestled on its lower slopes. Close on his right stood the hill Areopagus, with steps and caves cut in its brown-red sides. The wind, blowing lightly from the west, seemed full of dead memories of tiresome books, coming back to life and beauty. After that he sat for a time in front of the west façade of the Parthenon, which stood like some gracious presiding presence keeping watch over the town and the plain. High up on the pediment still rested the figure of a man and woman, she with her arm round him, he leaning against her breast, and behind the first row of columns rose the line of frieze showing the youth of Athens making their horses ready to start in the great birthday procession of the goddess. To the left stood the marble maidens, holding for ever on their heads the roof of the south porch of the Erecththeum, yet bearing it as no burden has yet been borne. One with her right knee bent, and hands loose by her side, stood as if she could have borne the weight of the world, and yet not been weary, and another like her, as a sister is like a sister, seemed just to have shifted her position, to have drawn the right foot back, and clasped her hands behind her. Between the more roughly cut blocks of foundation stones sprang vivid flowers, and the fallen columns of the great temple lay at rest on beds of long wavy grasses. High in the eastern heavens sat Pentelicus and Hymettus, two mountains of marble, and the quarries from which Athens had been built from generation to generation showed only like a couple of tiny scratches in their long flanks. Then looking over the east wall of the Acropolis, he saw the modern town spread out beneath him, with sober, grave cypresses keeping sentinel by the tower of the winds, or a little to the right that sad company of giants, the remaining columns of the temple of Zeus Olympios, standing like strange, tall men from some other land, gazed at by the crowd of inquisitive modern houses, that keep on pushing their way closer to them. After lunch he went to the museums and saw the lines of statues and reliefs, and said nothing. He went to the Street of Tombs, and saw other tomb reliefs standing as they had stood for two thousand years, under the deep blue of the southern sky, so placed that the grasses that sprang from their ashes budded and flowered in sight of the Acropolis; and the decade of summer days passed away.

An easterly gale and floods of driving rain kept him indoors one morning, and he wrote to Markham. An extract from his letter will give the state of his feelings better than anything else.

“I have been here between a week and a fortnight,” he wrote, “and I am no nearer making up my mind than I was at first. If the beauty of the whole place was not so overwhelming, I should have merely, as I expected to do, studied how the sculptors of that day rendered muscles, and examined the technique of their work. As it is, I have done nothing of the kind. Now and then when I am tired I suddenly remember the absolute perfection of some detail, but in general I don’t consciously notice it. The art is so triumphant that one cannot look at it in pieces. Men admired the sun before they peered at him through telescopes and found out sun-spots, and it was not till after that they tried to explain the sun-spots. It is the same with me; I can only look and wonder. An Englishman has offered very kindly to lend me some books about sculpture. The suddenness of my refusal startled him. I care nothing at present about schools, and the way one man rendered eyes and another rendered hair. I can’t judge it yet. But if they will build a temple of Pentelic marble in London, and stain it orange and red with weather, and put a hollow turquoise over it for a sky, and the Ionian Sea the colour of a sapphire in the background, I will do a statue for it. Some one told me once that I was not ambitious! Do you agree with that verdict? To-morrow if it is fine I go to Olympia. There is the finest thing of all there—a Hermes by Praxiteles. I don’t think either Praxiteles or Hermes come into your line. One was a god, and I rather expect to find that the other was too.”

From an artistic standpoint that visit to Olympia was perhaps the making of Tom; for all financial purposes it was his ruin. When he saw it, he said, “By Gad!” and stopped there half a day. The young god stands with his head a little bent, and a smile on his lips, looking at the babe whom he carries on his arm, half lost in his own thoughts. And the divine fire descended on Tom.

He stopped at Olympia for a day and a half, and then returned to Athens. Another artist had arrived at his hotel a day or two before, rather to Tom’s disgust, but he quickly made friends with him, and had left with him several photographs of a couple of statuettes he had made that autumn in England. They were extremely pretty and essentially modern in style. Manvers himself was of the most advanced realistic school, and had got past mere prettiness, and recorded sheer ugliness with the most amazing skill. He worked a good deal in Paris, but had come south owing to ill-health, and found a cynical pleasure in watching Tom’s enthusiasm for a school that was almost comically passé, as passé as crinoline. He had been through the same stage himself.

He had looked at the photographs Tom had given him with a good deal of respect, and was turning them over for the third or fourth time, when Tom himself came into the room on his return from Olympia. Manvers was lying at full length on a sofa, smoking a bitter weed.

“Ah, there you are!” he said. “Do you know these are devilish pretty?”

Tom strode across the room, and when he saw what Manvers was looking at, he frowned.

“Give them me, Manvers,” he said, and twitched them out of his hand.

It was a damp, windy day, and Manvers, who hated any temperature but the warmest, had made the hotel proprietor light a fire in the smoking-room. Tom looked at the photographs for a moment with intense disgust, and threw them into the fire. In a few moments the draught had carried a few fragments of crinkly ash up the chimney.

Manvers took a puff or two at his bitter weed.

“Ah! the Hermes is to blame for that, I suppose,” he said. “I’ve seen the photographs of it. That is why I did not go to Olympia with you. Partly also, because it is cold. I’m sorry you threw those photographs away; they were very pretty.”

“They were abominations,” said Tom, and sat down.

“And so you are going to set up a very life-size Apollo—six foot four in his sandals—as I did,” said Manvers, “and you will gnash your teeth over it every day for a month, and then you will return to your senses.”

“For the first time in my life I am fully sane,” said Tom. “I have seen perfection, and I know what it means. I shall find out the way to do it. Don’t laugh—I shall. It won’t be easy, but it can be done. It has been done once, and it can be done again. What a blind fool I have been!”

Manvers crossed one leg over the other.

“Yes, it’s delicious to feel like that,” he said. “I quite envy you. I felt like it once—and those things don’t happen twice. I congratulate you with all my heart, and I shall congratulate you more when you have recovered.”

Tom snorted with indignation.

“I am as sane as you are,” he said, “but I shan’t set up a life-size statue just yet; I have got to study first. I know what the language means, and I am going to read all that exists in it. I have got the key to it all. The whole thing used to puzzle me; it was an unknown tongue, obsolete and dead, I thought it. But now I have the means of finding it all out.”

Manvers closed his eyes.

“Nunc dimittis,” he said piously. “I suppose we may expect a new Greek god every year for the present. What will you do with them, by-the-by? Life-size figures take up such a lot of room in a studio.”

“That’s so like you,” said Tom; “as if it matters anything to me what happens to them. I shall produce them, that is enough.”

“So the rest of the world will think, as you will find.”

“What?”

“I mean they won’t go a step further, and wish to possess them.”

“My dear Manvers, what do I care?”

Manvers looked at him composedly.

“Yes, of course, it doesn’t matter to you just yet. But when the masterpieces are fruitful and multiply (masterpieces breed like rabbits, you know), you will begin to wonder by degrees why they are unappreciated. You will be like a struggling curate with many children. He loves them all, but he cannot help wondering wistfully what will happen to them.”

Tom shook his head with an air of benign superiority.

“You don’t really think that, do you?”

“Ah, well, it would be driving the case to extremes. What I expect will happen is that you will get tired of your masterpieces, or rather your first masterpiece, long before the rest of the world has an opportunity of doing so.”

Tom looked at him compassionately.

“Poor chap; of course you are blasé and disillusioned. It must be very uncomfortable.”

“From your point of view, I am, but not from my own. I saw a woman in the streets to-day with high-heeled boots and a parasol with lace round the edge, and the face of ... well, not of a fallen angel, but an angel who never rose. To you that would mean nothing, but to me it was a solid ingot of inspiration for terra-cotta tossed in my path. From my point of view you are simply blind.”

“Long may I remain so!” remarked Tom. “There’s the bell for dinner. I am not going to eat no dinner because the heavens are opened.”

“Did no manna fall into the railway carriage?” asked Manvers. “How forgetful of the Olympians!”

“No, I had lunch at Corinth,” said Tom, laughing.

Whether Tom was sane or not, he was not sufficiently mad to set up a life-size Apollo in his bedroom. The artist’s inspiration had descended on him, but not at present the artist’s inevitable need of producing. The inspiration had come in a flood, and he bathed in it; there would be time enough afterwards to wade out and devote himself to the task of utilizing a given amount of the water. He wandered about the museums, and sat on the steps of the Parthenon, picturing to himself the two long rows of statues which once led up from the gates, and turning to the long riband of frieze on the west to people the path again with the Panathenaic procession. They were gods, Athens was a city of gods, and gods could not die; they were youth, beauty, enthusiasm all realized, ready to be realized again. It was all very well for Manvers to talk about phases, and developments, and schools that were passées, and schools that were decadent, but when you are face to face with perfection....

Such was his creed. He believed in beauty. Even the classics—Xenophon with his parasangs, Thucydides with his Peloponnesian war—were glorified. Those men had been of the beautiful race, they had lived in the country where beauty unveiled had dwelt. They were to him as are, to one seeking for his love, men met by the wayside, men with whom she has spoken, on whom perhaps she smiled. They may not have known how fair she was, but even they were men different from others, for they had seen her, and could not be the same after that.

So he gave himself up heart and soul to his religion, and his religion lay broadcast like manna; he sat in the Dionysiac theatre, and read Aristophanes; he spelt out shorter Greek inscriptions with reverence; he walked to Eleusis by the sacred way; he sat an hour on the barrow at Marathon that holds the bones of the Greeks who conquered the Persians and died in victory. If this is to be mad, it is a pleasant thing to be mad, but it is a form of madness which is the outcome of youth and enthusiasm, and possibly genius, and is therefore not so common or so incurable as other forms.

Maud Wrexham’s anticipations about her visit to Athens were a good deal heightened by the knowledge that she would find Tom Carlingford there. They had met several times during the autumn in England, and she found his company very stimulating. Tom above all things was an enthusiast, and enthusiasts are usually very sympathetic people, because, having seen unlimited vistas opening out in their own line they are willing, even eager, to allow for unlimited vistas in any other. Maud’s vista was a wide one, embracing all mankind, just in the same way as Tom’s did, the difference lying in the fact that Tom meant to compass his ends by artistic achievement, which would compel admiration and awe, whereas Maud’s programme was entirely vague. She had a passion for the human race, and intended that they should have a passion for her.

Tom and she, being already fairly intimate, saw a good deal of each other. Maud, too, had experienced a quite peculiar pleasure in the sight of the Acropolis, and Tom’s presence by no means lessened it.

They were sitting one bright winter’s day on the steps of the little temple to Nike, which looks over the lower Attic plain, and across the narrow sea to Ægina and Salamis, and Tom was feeling a new-found joy in having some one to whom he could talk fully, being sure of sympathy. Though his artist’s nature had not yet insisted on the life-size Apollo, expression of some sort was becoming necessary to him.

He pointed towards Salamis.

“That’s where they smashed the Persian fleet,” he said, “and our Lady of Victory was standing here where you and I are sitting. She used to be a winged goddess, but when she saw that, she plucked off her wings, and became the Wingless Victory. At least, that is my version. And here they set her temple on high.”

Maud’s eyes sparkled, and she said nothing for a minute or two.

“I’m afraid I’m a pagan,” she remarked at length; “I believe in these gods and goddesses.”

“Why, of course you do,” said Tom. “These myths could never have been invented; they were a conviction. And a conviction is the only religion worth having.”

“But doesn’t it matter what the conviction is?”

“No, certainly not. One man’s conviction may not be the conviction of another man, or of any other man, but it is the true thing for him. A man’s conviction is that for which he was made.”

“But don’t you believe in a time when every one, dead or alive, will have the same conviction?”

“I hardly know. But at any given moment I can’t realize that it’s any conviction which I don’t share at that moment.”

Maud flushed ever so faintly before she spoke again.

“What is your conviction at this moment?”

Tom looked at her seriously, and examined the ferrule of his stick without speaking.

“What is yours?” he asked.

“Ah! but my question came first.”

“My conviction is that a man can realize either in others, or in some image in his brain which he works out perfectly or imperfectly, ideal beauty. It may be moral or physical beauty. And his mission is to do it.”

Maud had waited for his answer with an anxiety she could hardly explain to herself; her heart took upon itself to beat with quick throbs, that seemed to make her whole being alert. But this was only half an answer.

“And what is he to do with it when he has realized it?” she asked, with the same intentness.

“Surely that is enough,” said Tom. “He loves it, of course.”

He stood up and looked out over the sea. “My God! he loves nothing else!” he added.

For the life of her Maud could not help questioning him further.

“Yes, that, of course. But here one is in this puzzling world, and how is one to begin? My conviction is——”

“Yes, I know,” broke in Tom; “I remember you telling me perfectly. You want to make the whole world yours. So do I; and here is my first step ready for me.”

“Yes, you are an artist. That is a serviceable tool.”

“A tool? It is the end in itself. If you use it rightly, all the rest is there. The mainspring of this civilization which we see here was beauty. They conquered the Persians for the beauty of the thing.”

“Oh, I’m not so sure about that! I think their hearths and homes had something to do with it.”

“Then why had no one else conquered the Persians? Every nation they had already subdued had its hearths and homes. The Greeks had no more hearths and homes than others, and the biceps of the Greek was no bigger than that of other men. Everything else was only the wire down which the electric current came—and the electric current which killed the Persian was the love of art.”

“Then why did they fall before Rome?”

“Because the current had grown weak. Their art degenerated, and they fell.”

Maud scratched the cement pavement at her feet meditatively. She felt rather chilled and discouraged. She had expected—well, what had she expected?

“I think you are inhuman,” she said at last.

“Yes, I know I am. I believe I have got hold of this tool, as you call it, and I think of nothing else but how to use it. I must go back to England soon, and work.”

Maud had stood up, and the least tremor passed over her. Tom noticed it.

“You are catching cold,” he said, “sitting here. What an ass I was not to think of it before! Here’s your cloak; let me help you on with it.”

“Thanks—it is rather cold. I thought you were going to be out here all the winter.”

“I feel just now that I should like to stop here for ever.”

They had strolled back into the Acropolis, and Maud felt glad they were moving, for a silence then is less embarrassing than when one is stopping still. Their talk had been a little upsetting to her in some way, and she wanted a moment to steady herself in. They had left Arthur Wrexham sitting in a rather forlorn manner on a large slab of cold Pentelic marble. He refused to come on to the Nike bastion because he was smoking a cigarette, and there was a wind there. So he contented himself with answering in a vaguely appreciative manner, how very classic it all was, and that he should certainly come there again. His opportune appearance at this moment, sitting in a more sheltered corner than ever, facing a blank white wall, gave Maud an opportunity of recovering herself.

“Dear Arthur, are you finding it all very classic,” she said, “and just a little melancholy? Never mind; we can’t take you to the museum, as we threatened to do, because it closes at twelve, so you need only just walk up as far as the Parthenon, because I want to look at something, and then we’ll all go down. Really, you are a very bad chaperon; you sit in a corner opposite a blank wall. Mr. Carlingford has been saying the most unconventional things.”

“I have been mentioning the objects and purposes of art,” remarked Tom.

“Ah, how nice!” murmured Arthur; “all about Doric columns and so on, I suppose. Do tell me some day. Maud, we shall be dreadfully late for lunch.”

“Yes, dear, I know we shall,” said Maud.

“Well, then, wouldn’t it really be as well to leave the Parthenon alone, just for the present? You can see the Parthenon any day.”

“Well, you can have lunch any day,” said Maud; “and you do have it every day.”

Arthur Wrexham made a resigned little sound, partaking of the nature of a sigh, and followed them.

They were lunching with Tom at his hotel, and when they went out on to the balcony afterwards to drink the thick sweet Turkish coffee, they found Manvers sitting in the sun, feeding on his own thoughts. The thoughts chiefly ran on the subject of the possibility of representing lace—real thin lace, and not great fluffy bunches of it—in terra-cotta, and it really seemed as if it might be done. La dame qui s’amuse must have lace, all round her parasol and down the front of her dress.

He looked doubtfully at his cigar, after shaking hands with Maud. The class qui m’ennuie were not so tolerant. Maud caught the glance.

“Not on my account, please,” said she. “I don’t mind it in the least.”

“Well, on my account, then,” said Tom. “He smokes curly Italian weeds, Miss Wrexham. They smell of goat’s cheese.”

“My dear fellow,” said Manvers, “you are in the Havannah stage with all your tastes.”

“Isn’t that rather a good stage to be in?” asked Miss Wrexham.

“Quite delightful for yourself, but it makes you a little intolerant of other people. Tom dislikes my statuettes as much as he dislikes my cigars.”

“I dislike them very much more,” said Tom fervently.

“There, you see—you may judge how much he loathes them.”

“Bring one out,” said Tom, “and see if Miss Wrexham doesn’t agree with me.”

“I don’t carry my own statuettes about with me,” said Manvers; “one’s own works are very bad company. When you have begun on your life-size Apollo, you will know why.”

“Apollo shall dine with me every night.”

“My dear fellow, how you will bore each other!” said Manvers.

Maud Wrexham began to laugh.

“You mustn’t pea-shoot each other in public,” she said. “When doctors disagree, they must do so out of hearing of their patient.”

“Are you a patient?” asked Manvers.

“Yes, under treatment. I have been on the Acropolis all the morning, with my brother and Mr. Carlingford. You’re not a patient, are you, Arthur?”

“It struck me I was very patient,” said he.

Maud reflected a moment.

“No, it’s not at all a good joke, dear; it’s not either good enough or bad enough to be good.”

“Extremes meet, you know,” explained Tom.

“That’s why you and Mr. Manvers come and stay at the same hotel, I suppose,” said she.

“We don’t often meet,” remarked Manvers. “Tom goes to the Acropolis, and I sit on the balcony.”

“Then why did you come to Athens?” asked Maud; “surely there are better balconies elsewhere.”

“He’s really becoming a convert,” said Tom; “he’s not so black as he paints himself.”

“My dear Tom, I never paint myself, it is you who paint me; and to do you justice, you paint me as black as you can.”

Poor Arthur Wrexham looked appealingly at the company.

“I think I shall go for a little stroll,” he said. “When are you likely to be ready, Maud?”

Maud finished her coffee.

“I’m coming now,” she said. “Don’t forget to-morrow, Mr. Carlingford—you call for us at nine.”

“They’re going up Pentelicus,” said Arthur plaintively; “I’m going too.”

Tom looked at him severely.

“Yes, it’s the one you told me was Hymettus,” he said. “It’s time you went. You won’t confuse them again.”

“I didn’t confuse them before,” said Arthur. “You can’t confuse two things, unless you know them both, and then mix them up. I didn’t know either.”

“Well, you’ll know one after to-morrow,” said Maud encouragingly, “and then you can get at the other by an exhaustive process.”

CHAPTER VII.

Meanwhile the “sheltered life” had gone on as usual at Mr. Markham’s. The delight in Ted’s success had moved away into its appointed background, in front of which the slow, happy days passed on as uneventfully as ever. But about November a change took place. The Lord Chancellor appeared to have been suddenly struck by Mr. Markham’s admirable editions of school classics, or perhaps the fame of the neat covers of the books May stitched for the parish library had reached him, and he offered him the living of Applethorpe, which had just become vacant. Mr. Markham was unwilling to leave his old parish, and May even more so, but the offer was not one to be refused. Applethorpe was a large country parish, and, what was a distinct advantage, a richer one than Chesterford; old Mr. Carlingford, in particular, though careful to avoid in his own person direct means of grace, being always ready to supply funds whereby it might be administered to others.

Ted was delighted with the change; his roots had been transplanted so often in school and university life that they never struck very deeply in the soil of Chesterford. The close neighbourhood of Tom’s house weighed heavily in favour of Applethorpe, and the accessibility of Lord Ramsden’s library, which contained many dust-ridden old volumes, among which he had visions, as every book-lover has, of finding undiscovered treasures in the way of twelfth-century missals, was not without its effect. May alone did not like it. It seemed to her that she was going out into new and more elaborate places, which might prove perplexingly different from the green fields and country lanes she knew so well. Things were going to be on a bigger scale; they would keep one curate, perhaps two; London itself loomed on the horizon, and when her father had gone to see the place, he came back saying that it looked a pretty country but there had been a London fog, which had drifted down from town.

However, she quite acquiesced in her father’s decision, and before Christmas they had moved.

Their house stood at one end of the long straggling village, a typical rectory of the older class, with a tennis lawn in front and a stable-yard behind, a hall paved with red tiles, and far too much ivy and virginia creeper on the walls. Ted arrived soon after from Cambridge, with a large square box full of books, which could only just get through the front door.

He and May had gone a long exploring walk in the country one afternoon, and were returning home along the clean frozen road through the village. They had been talking about the place.

“It’s so big, Ted,” May had said, “it almost frightens me, as I told you once a big place would do. It is so hard to get hold of a lot of people like this.”

“Well, there will be a curate, won’t there?” said Ted. “Of course it’s too large for father alone.”

“Yes, I know there will; but you don’t understand. I must get hold of them myself. I must do all I did at Chesterford, and more.”

Ted looked at her kindly.

“Yes, I know how you feel about it. It’s the personal relation you want, isn’t it?”

“No, I don’t care about their personal relation to me. They might all hate me if they liked. But the quickest way to get at people’s hearts for any purpose is to make them like one.”

“Don’t be worried, May,” said he. “You will soon get to know them all, unless I’m very much mistaken.”

“Ah, but just think of the state things are in! I went to see an old woman yesterday. She couldn’t understand at first why I came. I told her I was the new vicar’s daughter, and she asked me what I wanted. The late vicar used never to visit anybody, she said.”

“Yes, it will be hard work.”

“I wish you could come here after you were ordained,” said May, “as father’s curate.”

“I must stop at Cambridge,” said Ted. “You wouldn’t wish me to give that up?”

“No, I suppose not,” said May; “and yet, I don’t know. I think parish work is the highest in the world.”

“There is plenty of that to do in Cambridge,” said Ted, “for that matter; but I am not the man to do it. I can’t do it as you can—and father,” he added.

“Ah, but what is good work in other lines compared to any work in that?” said May, earnestly—“especially for a man who means to be a clergyman.”

“Yes, but other things can’t be neglected. You have no business to leave alone what you think you can do, for anything else. One’s talents, whatever they are, are given one to use.”

“But is there not ‘that good part’?” asked May.

Ted walked on in silence a little way.

“I did not know you thought of it like that,” he said at length. “Do you admit no call but that of saving souls directly by your means?”

“I didn’t know I felt it myself, till we came here,” said May; “until I saw this place so absolutely uncared for. Look at the rich people, too. Old Mr. Carlingford is very liberal, because he is very rich; but he never comes to church.”

“Ah, that reminds me,” said Ted. “Tom is coming home soon, in about a fortnight, he said.”

May paused on the doorstep.

“I suppose he will come here, won’t he? I didn’t know he was coming back so early.”

And she turned rather quickly, and went into the house.

The new curate soon came, and fulfilled to the utmost all the admirable accounts of himself which had led to his engagement. He was strong and vigorous, and exerted all his vigour and strength in the work to which he had been called. He was even bold enough to pay a visit to Mr. Carlingford single-handed, and the latter gentleman conversed to him very fluently and agreeably for half an hour on the coal-strike, and the lamentable weakness of the English fleet in the Mediterranean, offered to draw a cheque then and there to supply coal for villagers who were unable to have fires in this very nipping weather, and courteously declined to interest himself any further.

He was walking back through the village, and met May there, who had been visiting.

“I have just been to see Mr. Carlingford,” he said.

May looked up quickly.

“I didn’t know——” she began. “Oh! old Mr. Carlingford. Yes. Did you get anything out of him?”

“I got a cheque,” said Mr. Douglas.

May laughed.

“Yes, that’s not so difficult, though it’s something to be thankful for. These poor creatures are half frozen.”

“Mr. Carlingford really is very generous. But is there no hope of getting hold of him really? He might do much more than he does.”

“I wonder. Tom Carlingford is coming home this week. He might do something with his father. I’ll ask my brother about it. By the way, we are dining there to-night. Are you going?”

“No, I’ve got my cheque,” said the young man. “That’s enough for one day. Besides, I have a boys’ meeting at Chipford Mills. I must leave you here. I have to go up to Breigton cottages first.”

May turned and shook hands with him.

“It’s absurd for me to thank you for all you are doing,” she said. “You do all sorts of things which my father couldn’t possibly do, and which we have no right to expect.”

“Surely that is a curate’s business,” he said, laughing, and taking off his hat.

Mr. Markham was suffering from a slight cold, and he had not been out that day. He was sitting over the fire in the drawing-room, reading a comedy of Aristophanes, when May came in.

“How cold you look!” he said. “I ordered tea as you were a little late.”

“Yes; I couldn’t come before, father,” she said, “and even now I have only got through half the things I wanted to do.”

“Never mind, dear; but you should make an effort to be punctual; and charity begins at home, eh, May?”

May turned from the fire, where she had been warming her hands, and poured out a cup of tea. Her father, seeing he got no answer, continued somewhat reproachfully—

“My cold is rather worse this evening, and I can’t think what you did with that medicine. I couldn’t find it anywhere.”

“I put it on the table in your study.”

“No, dear. I think not. I looked for it there.”

May went out of the room and brought back the bottle.

“Yes, it was there. You had put some of your papers on to it.”

“Thanks very much. I hope you took care not to disturb the papers.”

“No, I disturbed nothing. Will you have some now?”

“No, I’ve just had my tea. I was wanting it before tea. I always take it before meals, you know.”

May sat down in a chair and stirred her tea.

“Mr. Carlingford has given Mr. Douglas a cheque to get coals for the people. It’s fearfully cold, and, poor things, many of them can’t afford coals.”

“A good fellow, Douglas,” murmured Mr. Markham, as he smiled appreciatively at Aristophanes.

“I was wondering if we couldn’t let them have some wood,” said May. “There are stacks of it in the yard.”

Mr. Markham put his finger in his place.

“Yes, I will see about it. Who want it?”

“Oh, half a dozen of the cottages down here, and more at the mills.”

“Well, dear, hadn’t you better make a little list? It would save me some trouble. Dear me, the fire wants mending. And then, if you would let me have it in about an hour, I could just finish this play.”

“We dine at Mr. Carlingford’s to-night,” said May.

“Yes, dear, I know. Ah, δίκαιος λόγος. How admirable that is!”

Mr. Carlingford felt that he was doing his duty beautifully that evening. He had given a cheque to the curate in the afternoon, and he was having his vicar to dinner in the evening. His definition of duty was vague and comprehensive. It meant doing those things which he either did not wish to do or felt no desire to do. He had no desire to give Mr. Douglas a cheque, and he did not wish to have his vicar to dinner. The latter was therefore more clearly his duty than the former, since the essential character of such acts varied in exact ratio to their unpleasantness. An evening, he reflected, as he dressed for dinner, should be spent alone in a warm room, after a light meal, and be conveyed to the senses through the medium of several glasses of good port. Clergymen were often teetotalers, and it gave him a positive sense of discomfort to see people drinking water. Water was meant to wash in.

To him, in this state of mind, Mr. Markham was a pleasant surprise. He showed no inclination to talk about mutton broth and district visiting, he seemed to be well up in current topics of interest, and he was no teetotaler. In fact, he made some rather knowing remarks on the subject of cellars, and the depreciated nature of corks nowadays. And May really was an admirable girl. “Why didn’t that fool Tom fall in love with her, instead of heathen goddesses?” was his mental comment as she came in.

“I heard from my prodigal son to-day,” he said, as they were sitting at dinner; “he has decided to continue his prodigality for another month. The fatted calf may get fatter still. Poor boy! he is quite mad, and he means to fill the house with statues. Statues always give me the shivers. They really lower the temperature of the room. It is impossible to see too little of them.”

“They’ll have to go in the kitchen,” said Mr. Markham.

“An excellent suggestion, my dear Mr. Markham, but think of the soup! However, Tom is so dreadfully energetic, he always makes me feel hot. The statues shall be wheeled about with him, and that will preserve the equability of the temperature.”

“He wrote to my brother saying he was coming back at once,” said May.

“He does not deserve that you should remember that,” said Mr. Carlingford, urbanely. “But I shall be so glad to see him that I will tell him.”

“Oh, you needn’t do that,” said May, laughing.

Mr. Carlingford looked up at her a moment, and smiled to himself. That slight flush on May’s face might only have been the effect of coming out of the cold night air into warm rooms, but the other explanation pleased him more.

“You and Tom will have great talks about Greek sculpture and Greek literature, Mr. Markham,” said Mr. Carlingford, still adapting himself. “I hear you are a wonderful scholar.”

“I have so little time for anything but my parish duties,” said Mr. Markham, “that I never get the chance of working at classics. We are very busy here, eh, May?”

“Well, it’s an ill wind that blows no one any good,” said Mr. Carlingford, “and the parish is the gainer.”

The two gentlemen sat on in the dining-room afterwards, while May spent a lonely but pleasant quarter of an hour in the drawing-room. She was tired, for she had been out all day, and a low chair in front of the fire suited her mood exactly. She never read much, and the books on the table, chiefly by French authors of whom she had never heard, did not excite her interest. So she fed on her own thoughts, and made quiet uneventful plans for the future. When one is young, difficulties produce a quickening of the hand and pulse, not a tendency to give up, to be content with what is done. The powers of the mind and soul, like the muscles of the body, grow only through their active employment, and the harder the work the fitter they become. It is only when the capability of growth ceases that exertion is labour. Her thoughts ran on the events of the day, on the material as well as the spiritual needs of those clustered cottagers, on the want, the suffering.... There was one girl who lived alone in a tiny room in one of the poorer cottages with her week-old baby. It was the common story; she was weak and ill, and unable to work. Yet to such as her the promise had been made. The baby too; surely the words “How much more shall He feed you” did not mean the workhouse? She must consult her father about them. She had already started a Sunday afternoon class for children. Poor mites, they did not need theology yet; it was better to teach them to be clean, to show them pictures that would amuse them, to let them spend a happy hour in a warm bright room, with playthings and wooden bricks to build with.

And for herself, what? She neither wanted nor contemplated any change. The work that lay before her was so inevitably hers, that any possible change would be to neglect the whole purpose of her life. She was her father’s daughter, and he was a parish priest. What other call could there be for her which could be clearer than that? She rose from her chair and walked once or twice up and down the room, and stopped at length before a long mirror set in the wall. There was a lamp on either side standing on the top of two chiffoniers, and her image was reflected in bright light. She gazed a few seconds at herself without thinking what she was doing, and then drew in her breath with a sudden start, for she saw in the mirror a reflection, not of what she was used to think herself, but the reflection of a woman, and she was that woman. The whole thing flashed on to and off her brain in a moment, but it had been there.

Meanwhile Mr. Carlingford and his vicar were having a comfortable glass of port over the fire. The vicar liked everything to be good of its sort; his terriers were all in the kennel stud-book, his Walter Scott was an édition de luxe, and he had a beautiful Romney in his dining-room. And all Mr. Carlingford offered him was first-rate; the dinner had been excellent, the fire was of that superlative mixture, cedar logs and coal, and the port was certainly above criticism. He regretted profoundly that his slight cold had taken the edge off his sense of taste.

Mr. Carlingford expressed singular but original ideas on the subject of money.

“I had the pleasure of giving your curate, a delightful young fellow I should say,” he began, “a small cheque this afternoon. So many clergymen, Mr. Markham, if you will excuse a criticism on your fellow-workers, are distinguished only for their superficial grasp of subtleties; but Mr. Douglas is distinguished for his wonderfully keen grasp of the obvious. I asked him for how much I should draw the cheque, and he said at once the sum he wished to receive. I hope you will always ask me when you want anything.”

“You are very generous.”

Mr. Carlingford finished his glass, and put it down on the chimney-piece.

“Money may be the root of all evil,” he said, “but it is in itself a very necessary evil. It is one of those little snares without which we should be always tripping up. But it is a very troublesome thing. Tom, I know, detests money; perhaps that is why he spends it so quickly. However, there is always a chance of something smashing and his being left penniless, so he needn’t abandon all hope of being happy yet. He is a great friend of your son, is he not?”

“Yes, Ted saw a great deal of him at Cambridge, though he was a year or two the senior.”

“I was so glad to see he had got his Fellowship. I suppose he will remain at Cambridge.”

“Yes, he means to. He is fond of the place, and it is a pleasant life.”

“And that, after all, is the best investment you can make of your time,” remarked Mr. Carlingford.

“Not financially, I am afraid.”

“My dear Mr. Markham, you are confusing the end and the means. The harmless necessary cash can at the best only secure you a pleasant life, and if the pleasant life comes to you without, it becomes not necessary, but superfluous.”

“Well, there is no fear of cash ever being superfluous to Ted.”

“Cash is always superfluous, except when you cannot get credit,” said his host. “If there were no cash in the world we should all live in our several stations on our credit with each other, and how much simpler that would be!”

“I am afraid there would be complications ahead.”

“There are always complications ahead,” said Mr. Carlingford, “but in the fulness of time they fall behind. Meanwhile one rubs along somehow. Shall we move into the next room?”

It is to be feared that if Tom, in the new life that had opened for him at Athens, could have seen how Ted was spending his life at Cambridge, he would have been far from satisfied with him. It requires strong vitality or real originality to avoid the paralyzing effect which routine brings with it, and though Ted was original enough to give birth to some theories concerning patristic literature which were received in the most favourable manner by past masters of his craft, his horizons were imperceptibly narrowing around him. It is the peculiar property of such changes that they are imperceptible; to be alive to them would be to guard against them, for no thinking man acquiesces in limitations which he can see. He spent long mornings of steady work, he took gentle exercise in the afternoon, and played whist for an hour or two after hall; and any routine, when one is surrounded by men who are engaged in similar routines, is deadly. He let old acquaintances drop, he did not care to initiate new ones, and he lived with a few men who were in the same predicament as himself, and was perfectly happy. He worked not for fame’s sake, but for the sake of the work, and though his method of working is undoubtedly the more highly altruistic, yet it has to be paid for in other ways. A little personal ambition is a very human and therefore a very suitable thing for men, for it keeps one alive to the fact that one is one man among other men, not one machine for producing knowledge among other machines. A machine may very likely do the work better; a perfect machine would do it perfectly, but it will not become a man by so doing, though a man, as the higher of the two, may quite easily degenerate into a machine.

Ted’s talk with May about parish work led to his taking a district in Barnwell, and doing work there. But, as he told her, he had no power of doing that sort of thing—he had none of the missionary spirit, nor any desire now to enter into the personal relation with his fellows, which distinguished, though in opposite ways, both his sister and Tom. The sight of dirt and squalor was productive in him, in the first instance, not of a desire to make it clean, but to go away. He realized to the full how deplorable a state of uncleanliness, physical or moral, was, and he would have been very uncomfortable to think that there were not well-endowed institutions the object of which was to rectify it.

Before Tom had gone away in November, he completed a couple of statuettes, which he had made during the summer, had them cast in bronze by the cire perdue process, and sent them to a winter exhibition. He had only just received the news that they had been accepted before he went away, and had heard nothing of them since. But one day in the winter Ted had been turning over a current number of the Spectator, and found them mentioned in a notice of the exhibition with that high praise which is both rare and convincing, and felt a strong but unsympathetic pleasure, for, judging from his own point of view, he would have felt none himself that a casual critic thought them good. A few nights afterwards, by one of those coincidences which would be so strange if they were not so common, he met at dinner with the master of another college, the sculptor Wallingthorpe, who talked chiefly about himself, but a little about his art. He was a picturesque man, and his picturesqueness added a strong flavour to his conversation.

“I seldom or never go to exhibitions,” he said. “A beautiful subject badly treated warps one. One has to be convalescent after it. One’s artistic sense has been bruised, and it has to recover from the blow: the injured tissues have to heal.”

Ted mentioned the name of the exhibition where Tom’s studies had appeared, and asked if he had been there.

“Yes, I did go there—no wine, thanks; I never take wine, by the way. It is a stimulant, and I don’t require stimulating, I require soothing. I am glad you mentioned that exhibition; there were two studies there of extreme, unusual merit. They produced in me that feeling that I could have done the thing myself, that I wished I had. That is the final excellence from one’s own point of view. They realized to me the vision I might have had.”

“Whom were they by?” asked Ted.

“By quite a young man, I believe; certainly by quite a new one. Carlingford was the name.”

“Ah! I know him well,” said Ted.

They were sitting over the wine after dinner, and Wallingthorpe, who did not care to talk to Ted exclusively any longer, but wanted a larger audience, bent forward and shook him warmly by the hand. This was done in a dramatic and fervid manner, and naturally drew the attention of the rest of the table.

Wallingthorpe turned round to explain himself.

“I was congratulating Mr. Markham on knowing a man of genius,” he said.

The natural inference was that these felicitations were offered to Ted on the happy event of his having become acquainted with Wallingthorpe, but that gentleman was self-denying enough to dispel the idea.

“I was speaking of two very remarkable little works in the Ashdon Gallery, by a young man called Carlingford, with whom Mr. Markham tells me he is intimate. They are very faulty in many ways, but faults matter nothing when there is the divine essential burning behind them. Mr. Carlingford is an uncut diamond. There are superficial flaws in the stone, which will be polished away. He has only got to work and to live.”

“Carlingford,” said some one; “he was up at King’s till quite lately, was he not?”

Mr. Marshall blinked intelligently behind his spectacles.

“Yes, but we had no idea we were harbouring a genius. In fact, no one even suspected he had real talent of any kind. But he was not stupid.”

“It is possible, even probable, that he had no talent,” exclaimed Wallingthorpe. “Genius and talent have nothing in common. You might as well expect to find a bird that had hands because it has wings. Genius flies, talent—the metaphor breaks down—walks on its hands and feet. But what made you think he had no talent?”

“His work was always very careless, and showed no very distinct promise.”

Wallingthorpe beat the air with prophetic hands.

“His Greek prose! His Latin verses! His οὐ and his μἠ That is very likely. Did it not occur to any one that you might as well have set a wild Indian to hem handkerchiefs?”

“You see we all have to hem handkerchiefs here,” said his host urbanely; “that is the reason why young men come to Cambridge.”

“And you wonder when your thorns bear grapes and your thistles figs!” said Wallingthorpe. “Yet those are to blame who did not know that the thistle was a fig-tree.”

Dr. Madeford laughed good-naturedly.

“But we are all delighted when we find it bearing figs,” he said, “although, of course, we don’t allow that we thought it a thistle. We have a higher idea of what we study.”

Wallingthorpe became pacific.

“Consider me rebuked,” he said, “but think of the pity of it. Four or five years ago that boy ought to have been alternately turned loose in Rome and shut up with a model and a mountain of clay. By now those defects would have vanished. They would never have been in his nature. Their possibility would have been taken out of him before they had birth.”

“Then you have really a high opinion of his work?” asked Markham.

“My dear young man, I have the highest. He has genius, and he has love of his work. Show me the man of whom I can say that, and I hail him as a brother.”

Wallingthorpe’s egotism was too deep to call conceit; it was a conviction that was the mainspring of his nature, the driving-power of his work. It should not matter to the outside world what the driving-power is, if the result is admirable, and Wallingthorpe’s results certainly were admirable.

But further conversation would seem bathos after this, and the party passed into the drawing-room.

Wallingthorpe had a word or two more with Ted as he was leaving.

“What is Carlingford doing now?” he asked.

“He’s in Athens, working there.”

“A dangerous experiment. Is he much impressed by classical art?”

“Very much indeed; he believes in nothing else, he says.”

The sculptor frowned.

“That means he will try to stand on tip-toe for a month or two instead of flying. However, he will get tired of that. He will soon learn that the only real art is realism.”

“He says that a sculptor out there called Manvers is always impressing that on him.”

“Manvers? Well, no one ever accused Manvers of not being a realist. That is about the only crime he has never been suspected of. Manvers is extremely talented, but he has not a touch of genius. However, for diabolical cleverness in his work he can’t be touched. On the other hand, any tendency in Carlingford to idealism might be encouraged by Manvers indirectly. He would find it impossible, if he had leanings that way, not to have his bias strengthened by anything so rampantly realistic as Manvers’ work.”

“Tom Carlingford is coming back to England in a few weeks.”

“I’m glad of that. The future is in his own hands.”

CHAPTER VIII.

Manvers’ good intention of taking a holiday had presumably gone to pave the worst of roads, for before a fortnight was up he was working hard at the new statuette. The solid ingot of inspiration which had been tossed in his path was only slightly responsible for this; the burden of it lay with Maud Wrexham.

For Maud Wrexham was to him a new type of womanhood, common enough in England, but a type which does not foregather with young artists in Paris; and Manvers was beginning to think of the Paris days with a sort of disgusted wonder. To be received into the society of a well-bred English girl, to see her day after day, to be admitted by her into a frank, boyish sort of intimacy, was a proceeding he would have looked upon, a month or two ago, as a very doubtful privilege. He thought of our English marriageable maidenhood as a kind of incarnation of lawn tennis and district visiting, with a background of leaden domesticity, and when Maud began, somehow, to usurp an unreasonably large share of his spare thoughts, he was at first a little amused at himself, and, after a time, pulled up short and began to review the position.

He had seen almost at once who it was who usurped her thoughts, though he felt sure that a casual observer, one whose own mind was fancy free, would not have noticed it. She was intensely conscious of Tom’s presence, and to Manvers she betrayed herself by a hundred tiny signs. When they were alone, she, as was most natural, for they were a trio of friends, often talked of Tom, and when he was there she evidently listened to all he said, and was intensely conscious of him, though she might be talking to some one else. As a rule, she behaved quite naturally; but once or twice she had exhibited towards him a studied unconsciousness, which to Manvers was a shade more convincing than her consciousness. He had a weakness for weaknesses, and the dramatic side of it all, her self-betrayal to him and Tom’s unconsciousness, would have given him a good deal of satisfaction, had he known that he was without a stake in the matter. But as the days went on, he became aware that it mattered a good deal to him, and the satisfaction he got out of the drama was a very poor wage for his own share in it.

Besides, he distinctly did not wish to fall in love. “Love may or may not blind,” he said to himself, “but it plays the deuce with your eye, if you are a sculptor.” And so, by way of keeping his eye single, he set to work, with patient eagerness, on La dame qui s’amuse. The title itself brought a savour with it of Paris days, and Paris days could hardly help being antidotal to the feelings with which Maud Wrexham inspired him.

There was yet one more factor which made him plunge into his work, and that was the thought of Tom. Tom just now was sublimely unconscious of anything so sublunary as falling in love with mortals, for he had lost his heart to antique goddesses, who again presented a fine contrast to Miss Wrexham. Manvers, as a rule, left morals to moralists, among whose numbers he had never enlisted himself; but a certain idea of loyalty, of letting Tom have fair play when he came to take his innings, made him avoid the idea of setting up personal relations with Miss Wrexham. Whether he would have taken the chivalrous line, if any one but Tom had been concerned, is doubtful, but Tom somehow exacted loyalty. His extraordinary boyishness made Manvers feel that it would be an act of unpardonable meanness to take any advantage of him. Besides, in a sense, the fortress to which he himself would have liked to lay siege was, he felt sure, ready to capitulate to another, but it struck him that it was likely to repel an attack from any other quarter but that with much vigour. To sit still and do nothing was more than flesh and blood could stand; it was hard enough to work, and the only thing to do was to work hard.

Tom’s tendencies towards idealism were, as Wallingthorpe had suspected, encouraged rather than discouraged by Manvers. “If that,” he thought and often said, “is realism, God forbid that I should be a realist.”

He said this to himself very emphatically one morning when he came to see Manvers after breakfast. The latter was already at work, and Tom gazed at “La dame” for some moments without speaking. Manvers’ handling of the subject was masterly, and the result appeared to Tom quite detestable.

“I quite appreciate how clever it is,” Tom said to Manvers, who was testing his powers of “doing” lace in terra-cotta with great success, “and I wonder that you don’t appreciate how abominable it is.”

Manvers was at a somewhat ticklish point, and he did not answer, but only smiled. Nature had supplied him with a rather Mephistophelean cast of features, and he had aided her design by the cultivation of a small pointed beard. At this moment Tom could fancy that he was some incarnation of that abstraction, dissecting a newly damned soul with eagerness and delicacy, in the search for some unusual depravity. After a moment he laid the tool down.

“I appreciate it fully from a spiritual, or moral, or Greek, or purist point of view, he said. But I am not in the habit of taking those points of view, and in consequence I am—well, rather pleased with it.”

“I think it’s a desecration,” said Tom. “Why you are not struck with lightning when you call it art, seems to me inexplicable!”

Manvers laughed outright.

“My dear Tom, I never called it art—I never even called it Art with a big A. That is not the way to get on. You must leave other people to do that. If you were an art critic, which I hope, for my sake, you some time may be, you would be immensely useful to me. One has only got to get an Art critic (with a big A) to stand by one’s work, and pay him so much to shout out, ‘This is the Abomination,’ and one’s fortune is made. I am thinking of paying some one a handsome salary to blackguard me in the Press. Criticism, as the critic understands it, would soon cease, you see, if every one agreed, and so the fact that one critic says it is abomination, implies necessarily that another critic will come and stand on the other side and bawl out, ‘This is Sublime’ (with a big S). Artists and critics are under a great debt to one another. Critics get as much as sixpence a line, I believe, for what they say about artists, and artists would never get a penny if it wasn’t for critics, whereas, at present, some of us get very considerable sums. What was I saying? Oh yes, one critic damns you and the other critic blesses you. Then, you see, every one runs up to find out what the noise is, and they all begin quarrelling about it. And the pools are filled with water,” he concluded piously.

Tom did not answer, and Manvers went on with slow precision, giving each word its full value.

“Of course it is chiefly due to the capital letters. Whether the criticism is favourable or not matters nothing as long as it is emphatic. In this delightful age of sky signs, the critics must be large and flaring to attract any notice. Therefore they shout and use capital letters. They write on the full organ with all the stops out, except the Vox Angelica. And the artist blesses them. Like Balaam, their curses are turned into blessings for him, so he blesses them back. A most Christian proceeding.”

“But, honestly,” asked Tom, “does the contemplation of that give you any artistic pleasure? Do you try to do for your age what Phidias and Praxiteles did for theirs?”

“Certainly I do. I try to represent to people what their age is. I have no doubt that ancient Greeks were excessively nude and statuesque. We are not statuesque or nude. Apollo pursuing Daphne through the Vale of Tempe, through thickets where the nightingales sing! What does Apollo do now? He arranges to meet Daphne at Aix-les-Bains, where they have mud-baths, and drink rotten-egg water. She wears an accordion-pleated skirt, and he a check suit. In their more rural moments they sit in the hotel-garden. It really seems to me that this little Abomination here is fairly up to date.”

“Oh, it’s up to date enough!” said Tom. “But is that the best of what is characteristic of our age?”

“That doesn’t concern me,” said Manvers blandly; “worst will do as well. What I want is anything unmistakably up to date. Your gods and goddesses, of course, are more beautiful from an ideal point of view. By the way, that reminds me, I want to look at some of those early figures; the drapery is very suggestive. I am going to do a statuette of a nun who has once been—well, not a nun, and I want archaic folds; but if I produced them now, they would be nothing more than uninteresting survivals. And to produce an uninteresting survival seems to me a most deplorable waste of time.”

“Why don’t you make a statuette of a sewing-machine?” asked Tom savagely.

“Oh, do you think sewing-machines are really characteristic of the age?” said Manvers. “I don’t personally think they are, any more than Homocea is. Sewing-machines are only skin-deep. I wonder when you will be converted again—become an apostate, as you would say now. You really had great talent. Those statuettes of yours at the Ashdon Gallery are attracting a great deal of attention.”

“I wish I had thrown them into the fire before I sent them there!”

“Well, when you come round again, you will be glad you didn’t,” said Manvers consolingly.

Tom took a turn or two up and down the room.

“You don’t understand me a bit,” he said suddenly. “Because I think that the Parthenon frieze is more beautiful than women with high-heeled shoes, you think I’m an idealist. I am a realist, just as much as you are, only I want to produce what I think is most beautiful. A beautiful woman has much in common with Greek art—and you want to produce what men, who are brutes, will say is most lifelike. You work for brutes, or what I call brutes, and I don’t.”

“But if I have come to the conclusion that what you call brutish appeals to more men than what you call beautiful, surely I am right to work for them? Of course most artists say they work for the few, but I, like them, confess that I wish the few to be as numerous as possible.”

“The greatest evil for the greatest number, I suppose you mean,” burst in Tom. “I call it pandering to vicious tastes.”

Manvers paused, then laid down the tool he was working with.

“You are overstepping the bounds of courtesy,” he said quietly. “You assume that my nature is vicious. That you have no right to do.”

Tom frowned despairingly.

“I know. It is quite true. I hate the men who always tell you that they say what they think, but I am one of them.”

Manvers laughed.

“I don’t mind your thinking me vicious,” he said. “I dare say I am vicious from your point of view, but you shouldn’t tell me so. It savours of Billingsgate, and it is quite clear without your telling me of it. You insult my intelligence when you say so.”

“In that I am sorry,” said Tom. “I never meant to do that. I wish you would leave your—well, your Muse alone, and come out.”

Manvers looked out of the window.

“I suppose I shall have to come,” he said. “But you are so violent, you never will consent to take carriage exercise. Luckily you can’t ask me to play outdoor games here, as there are no outdoor games to play. Dominoes is the only outdoor game I can play—I have done so outside French cafés. I’m afraid I can’t say it’s too cold.”

“I should insult your morality if you did,” said Tom.

“Well, that’s not so bad as insulting my intelligence.”

“And that is exactly where we differ,” said the other.

Arthur Wrexham was giving a small party the next evening, of a very recherché order, the dinner being served frothily in paper frills, shells, or on silver skewers, and the candles shaded in so cunning a manner that it was barely possible to see what the food was. He lived in a somewhat sumptuous set of rooms on the upper square of the town, and for a week or more, as the sirocco had been blowing, had been in a state of apparently irretrievable collapse.

A little balcony opening out of his dining-room overlooked the square, and as the night was very hot, the glass-door on to it was left open, and the noises of the town came up to the guests as they sat at dinner, like a low accompaniment to their own voices. It had been one of those days when the divine climate of Athens gives way to all the moods of an angry woman. The morning had dawned bright and hot, but before ten o’clock sirocco had sprung up, and whoso walks in the face of sirocco is bathed through and through in a fine white dust, most gritty. The sirocco had brought the clouds from seawards, and about one o’clock the rain came down, and laid the dust. Then the sun shone violently till nearly five, and the air was like to a sticky warm bath. Later on it had clouded over again, and Tom remarked in a pause in the conversation that it had begun to lighten.

It was quite a small party, the two younger sisters of the American chargé d’affaires balancing Tom and Manvers, Arthur and his sister making up the six. The two Miss Vanderbilts both talked as much as possible, sighed for “Parrus,” and referred to the Acropolis as “those lonely old ruins,” but agreed that Athens was “cunning.”

“Well, I’m right down afraid of an electric storm,” remarked Miss Vanderbilt, to whom Tom’s remark about the lightning had been addressed, “and as for Bee, she won’t be comfortable until she’s said her prayers and is safe in the coal-store.”

“The doctor at Parrus told me I’d a nervous temperament,” remarked Bee, “and we all knew that before, but he made Popper pay up for saying so.”

“‘Speech is silver,’” remarked Manvers.

“Well, his speech was gold,” said Miss Vanderbilt.

“Don’t you dread electric storms, Miss Wrexham?”

Maud was sitting at the head of the table fanning herself. She had borne up against sirocco, but the sticky bath stage had finished her, and she felt, as Bee would have expressed it, as if they’d omitted to starch her when she was sent from the wash.

“No, I love them,” said Maud. “I wish it would begin at once. It may make the air less stifling.”

“Well, I’d sooner be stifled than lightning-struck,” said Bee, “it’s so sudden. Popper”—she referred to her father—“Popper says that an average electric storm discharges enough electric fluid to light Chicago for ten days. I think the table is just too elegant, Mr. Wrexham: where do you get your flowers from?”

Things improved a little as dinner went on, and after fish Maud felt better.

“What a dreadful materialist one is, after all,” she said. “Before dinner I was feeling that life was a failure in general, and I was a failure in particular, and now that I’ve had some soup and fish and half a glass of champagne, not only do I feel better bodily, but mentally and morally.”

“Why, I think that’s just beautifully put,” said Miss Vanderbilt. “When I feel homesick and lonesome, Bee says, ‘It’s all stomach.’”

“It’s quite true,” said Manvers. “I’ve only felt homesick once this year, and that was when Tom and I went to Ægina. It was fearfully hot, and all the lunch they had given us was hard-boiled eggs and cold greasy mutton. At that moment my whole soul, like Ruth’s, was ‘sick for home,’ and the little cafés with oleanders in tubs, and awnings. I say my soul, but I suspect it was what Miss Vanderbilt tells us.”

“Have I said anything wrong?” asked Miss Vanderbilt, looking round inquiringly. “I was only telling you what Bee said.”

Tom laughed.

“It’s easy enough to assure one’s self that one is only an animal,” he said. “I wish any one would prove to us that we are something more. When Manvers says his soul was sick, he is quite right to correct himself, and suspect that he meant the other thing.”

“My dear fellow, the soul epidemic has ceased,” said Manvers, “though I believe certain cliques try to keep it up. When you have looked at one of your gods or goddesses for an hour, you think you have been enjoying it with your soul, but you haven’t really. At the end of the hour you feel tired, and after eating a mutton chop you can look at it again. The mutton chop feeds that part of you which has been spending tissue on the gods and goddesses. Well, we know what the mutton chop feeds.”

“I won’t assure you that you have a soul,” said Tom, “but I assure you that I have.”

“It’s a most comfortable belief,” murmured Manvers. “I don’t grudge it you—I envy you. I wish you would do the same for me.”

The storm was getting closer, and every now and then the pillars on the balcony were thrown into vivid blackness against the violet background of the sky. The balcony was deep and covered with the projecting eaves of the third story, and after dinner they all sat out on it. The air was absolutely still, and apparently all the population of Athens were in the square, making the most of the evening air before the storm broke.

Tom was sitting on the balustrade of the balcony, and Maud in a low chair near him. She leant forward suddenly.

“Do you remember hearing the hum of London one night, and saying it was the finest thing in the world?”

“Yes, very well. It was at the Ramsdens’ dance. I shall hear it again soon.”

“Ah, you are going almost immediately, I suppose, now?”

As she spoke, the sky to the south became for a moment a sheet of blue fire, with an angry scribble running through the middle of it, and Miss Vanderbilt ejaculated in shrill dismay.

Tom turned as Maud spoke, and the lightning illuminated her face vividly.

The glimpse he had of her was absolutely momentary, for just so long as that dazzling streamer flickered across the sky. But in the darkness and pause that followed he still saw her face before him, phantom-like, as when we shut our eyes suddenly in a strong light we still preserve on the retina the image of what we were looking at.

The phantom face slid slowly into the surrounding darkness, but it was not till the answering peal had burst with a sound as of hundreds of marbles being poured on to a wooden floor overhead that Tom answered the question which her voice had translated, but her eyes had asked.

“Well, I hardly know,” he said. “When are you thinking of going home?”

In that moment, when the thunder was crackling overhead, a flood of shame and anger had come over Maud. Of her voice she had perfect command, as she knew, but that the lightning should have come at that moment and showed Tom her face was not calculable. But the absolute normalness of his tone reassured her.

“I shall go back in about a fortnight,” she said.

“Why, that’s just about when I am going,” he said cheerfully. “I hope we shall travel together.”

And with the unhesitatingness of well-bred delicacy he got off the balustrade and began to talk to Miss Vanderbilt.

Tom was far too much of a gentleman to let his mind consciously dwell on what he had seen during that flash of lightning. He regarded it like a remark accidentally overheard, of which he had no right to profit. In this case the wish was also absent, for though he liked Maud Wrexham immensely, he was already in the first stage of his love of idealism, which at present allowed no divided allegiance. Had Maud been an idealist herself, she might have appeared to him merely as the incarnation of the spirit of idealism, in which case he would have fallen down and worshipped. Tom had experienced a great shock the day before, when she had expressed admiration for Manvers’ Dame qui s’amuse.

They were on the Acropolis together when Tom mentioned it, and asked if she had seen it.

“Yes, he showed it me this morning. I think it’s extraordinarily good.”

“But you don’t like it?” asked Tom.

“Is it so terrible if I do? I don’t like it as I like this”—and she looked round largely at the Propylæa—“but it gives me great pleasure to look at it. It’s so fearfully clever.”

“No man can serve two masters,” he said. “If you like this, as you tell me you do, you loathe the other necessarily.”

“Oh, but you’re just a little too fond of dogmatising,” said Maud. “What you lay down as a necessity may be only a limitation in your own nature. How do you know I can’t appreciate both? As a matter of fact I do.”

“Well, if you admire La dame you can’t possibly think of this—this which we see here—as supreme and triumphant,” said Tom.

“I’m not sure that I do. I think perhaps that I have a touch of the scepticism you had—oh, ever so long ago; six weeks, isn’t it?—when you expected to find that the grand style was obsolete. How we shall quarrel when we manage the world, as we said we proposed to do.”

“It’s quite certain that we shall never manage together, if there is this difference between us. I shall be wanting to celebrate Olympic games while you are laying out boulevards.”

“Well, there’s room for both,” said Maud.

“No, no,” said Tom, “there is never enough room for the best, far less for the worst.”

“You are so splendidly illogical, Mr. Carlingford,” she said suddenly; “you see, you assume one is the best, and one the worst, and then build upon it. It is all very well to do that for one’s self, but one becomes unconvincing if one does it for other people.”

“It was better than if I had said at once that we differed fundamentally.”

Maud turned away.

“Yes, perhaps. But what is the use of saying unpleasant things at all?”

“Unpleasant?” asked Tom, wrinkling his forehead. “Why, I differ from all my best friends diametrically on every conceivable topic.”

That classification of her with his best friends was exactly the attitude of his nature towards her, and what he saw during that flash of lightning was naturally extremely surprising, for, as he reflected to himself, despair should not look from one’s eyes when one hears that one’s best friends are going away. But, as he was bound in honour to do, he dismissed it as far as possible from his mind, and listened to Miss Vanderbilt’s scientific discourse about lightning.

“I should really feel much more comfortable if you would turn that big reflector round,” she was saying to Arthur Wrexham. “They say it attracts the thunderbolts, and I’m sure we don’t want to lay ourselves out to attract thunderbolts.”

Arthur Wrexham remonstrated gently.

“Oh, it really has no effect whatever on it,” he said. “In fact, glass is an insulator.”

This entirely vague statement was found to be consoling, and Miss Vanderbilt continued—

“I should be ashamed to be as silly as Bee about it,” she said. “Bee took off all her rings the last electric storm we had, and of course she couldn’t recollect where she put them, and you should have seen the colour of her frock when she came out of the coal-store. Oh, gracious! why, that flash went off quite by my hand here.”

Manvers was looking meditatively out into the night.

“The chances of being struck are so infinitesimal, Miss Vanderbilt, that I think it must have had a shot at you that time and missed. So by the law of probabilities it will not even aim at you again for a year or two. It really is a great consolation to know that one wouldn’t hear the thunder if one was struck.”

“Why, if you could hear the thunder, it would be all over,” said Miss Bee, with a brilliant inspiration.

“So after each flash we must wait anxiously for the thunder,” said Tom, “and then we shall know we’ve not been struck.”

“I guess there’s no great difficulty in finding out if you’ve been struck,” said Bee. “Popper saw a man struck once, and he went all yellow. Tell me if I am going all yellow, Mr. Manvers. I shan’t try to conceal it.”

“No amount of dissimulation would conceal the fact that one had gone all yellow,” said Manvers.

The worst of the storm was soon over, but the clouds took possession of Hymettus, and continued growling and rumbling there. The two Americans took advantage of the lull to make their way home. “For nothing,” Miss Vanderbilt protested, with shrill vehemence, “will make me get into a buggy during an electric storm;” and Tom and Manvers followed their example, and walked back to their hotel.

Manvers had seen that look on Miss Wrexham’s face at the moment of the flash of lightning, and he determined, wisely or unwisely, to mention it to Tom.

They were the only occupants of the smoking-room, and after getting his cigar under way, he asked the other lazily—

“By the way, what were you saying to Miss Wrexham that made her look like an image of despair? I caught sight of her face for a moment during a flash of lightning, and it looked extraordinary.”

“Yes, I noticed it too,” said Tom carelessly, “and wondered what was the matter. She had been rather upset by sirocco, she said.”

“My dear fellow, girls don’t look like petrified masks of despair because sirocco has been blowing for a couple of hours in the morning.”

“Well, I suppose it must have been something else then,” said Tom.

“What a brilliant solution! I am inclined to agree with you.”

Manvers remained silent for a few moments, balancing in his mind his disinclination to appear officious or meddling, and his desire to perhaps do Tom a service. As a matter of fact he had heard the question which had accompanied that look on Miss Wrexham’s face, and it had confirmed the idea he had long entertained that she was falling in love with Tom, and Tom was not consciously in love with her. His tone of absolute indifference to the subject might be either assumed or natural.

“You see a good deal of her, don’t you?” he went on. “She’s clever, I think, and she’s certainly got a good eye. She made several suggestions about my little figure which were admirable.”

“She told me she admired it,” said Tom, “and I told her she couldn’t admire it if she admired Greek work.”

“She wouldn’t agree with that. She thinks that she can appreciate both. It must be so nice to have that belief in yourself, to think that you are all sorts of people, instead of one sort of person. But it breaks down in practice——”

Manvers paused a moment, and decided to risk it.

“That look on her face this evening was of a woman who had broken down. I have often wondered, by the way, whether you ever have guessed how fortunate you are.”

Tom sat up.

“Did you hear what she said?” he asked.

“Certainly, or I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”

“Look here,” Tom said, “it was quite accidental that either of us ever saw that look. She couldn’t have foreseen that a flash of lightning would come at that moment. I have tried to keep myself from thinking of it, but it won’t do. I hate conceited fools who are always imagining things of that sort, but as you have spoken of it, it is absurd for me to pretend not to know what you mean. Damn it all! She looked—she looked as if my going away made a difference to her.”

Manvers drew a puff of smoke very slowly, and held his breath a moment. Then he began to speak, and it seemed to Tom slightly appropriate that his words should be, as it were, visible. They seemed a concrete embodiment of practical advice.

“I think she is very fond of you,” he said.

“What am I to do?” demanded Tom.

“Do?” he said. “I really don’t understand you. If you are in love with her, I imagine your course is not so difficult; if not, you may be sure you soon will be.”

“I should think it was the most unlikely thing in the world,” returned Tom. “If I had thought that, it is hardly likely I should have asked you what to do.”

“Pardon me, you never asked me, except under pressure. I made it quite clear that I wanted to be asked; you did not wish to ask me at all. I have my opinion to deliver. Listen. You are very fond of her, whether you know it or not. Just now you are stark mad about heathen gods. You say to yourself, or you would say to yourself if you formulated your thought, that you could only fall in love with a girl in the grand style. That is quite ridiculous. They may or may not be very good as statues, but they would certainly not answer as wives. In the natural course of things you will get over that. Try to do so as quickly as possible. Look at Miss Wrexham instead of the Parthenon. You can’t marry the Parthenon. That flash of lightning occurring when it did gave me a stronger belief in the existence of a beneficent Providence than I have ever felt before. It is only a superstitious idea, I know, but when a chance falls so divinely pat as that, you feel inclined to applaud somebody.”

Tom did not look at all inspired by these practical suggestions.

“It won’t do,” he said. “You take an admirably sensible view of the situation, if it happened to be you, but unfortunately it’s I.”

“I may be a knave,” said Manvers resignedly, “but, thank God, I am not a fool. I don’t suppose you will deny that you are a fool, Tom; and you really should give my advice a great deal of consideration. It is not every day that a flash of lightning shows you how high an opinion a perfectly charming heiress has of you, and it is, I think, both folly and wickedness not to suppose that it was sent you for some good or clever purpose. You really can’t help feeling that it was a very clever thing to send the lightning just then. You must have a special Providence who looks after you.”

“I hope you don’t think you will convince me,” said Tom.

“Oh dear, no, but I had to ease my—my conscience by entering a strong protest. I feel better now, thanks.”

“That’s right. But to descend to practical details, won’t the fact that she suspects I saw what I did make it rather awkward for us to meet?”

“Are you sure she suspects it?”

“No, not sure, or I should go away at once. I may be a fool, but I am not a knave.”

Manvers extended his hand in the air deprecatingly.

“Oh, don’t make repartees during a thunderstorm. They so seldom mean anything, in fact the better a repartee is, the less it means; and they give a nervous shock to the reparteee—if I may coin a word. Also he is bound in mere politeness to cudgel his brains to see if they do mean something. When you have an opportunity you must say she looked so awfully tired last night, and that you noticed her face once in a blaze of lightning, and you were quite frightened; she looked so out of sorts, or done up, or run down, or something. It’s very simple. But is there no chance——”

“No, not a vestige,” said Tom. “Besides, I don’t believe that you really advise what you say.”

“Tom, you’ve never heard me give advice before, and you must attach the proper weight to it as a rare product.”

“Why, you are always giving me advice about turning realist.”

“No, you’re wrong there; I only prophesy that you will. That I often prophesy, I don’t deny. There is nothing so amusing to one’s self, or so unconvincing to other people. It is the most innocent of amusements. Besides, you can always compare yourself to Cassandra—she was classical—when people don’t believe you.”

“Yes, that must be a great comfort,” said Tom slowly, who was thinking about Miss Wrexham.

Manvers got up.

“You are falling into a reverie. You ought to know that reveries are an unpardonable breach of manners. I shall go to my statuette. That is the best of being up to date in your art; you never need be without companions.”

“Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain height,” quoted Tom, half mock-heroically.

“My dear boy, it won’t do,” said Manvers. “She won’t come down for that. You have to fetch her down, and she is very like the rest of us really. She soon assimilates. Besides, luckily, maids on mountain heights are rare. They find it doesn’t pay.”

Tom left the room, and Manvers went to the window. The rain had come on again, and was falling hot and heavy through the night. Manvers dropped a steadfast oath into the storm, and then, instead of going to his statuette, went to bed, and lay awake till the darkness grew grey.

“The world is damnably awry,” was the burden of his thoughts. “I suppose it is to teach us not to set our affections on things below. They might have chosen a less diabolical method of teaching us, Providence is really very vulgar sometimes.”

Maud woke next morning in the rationalizing mood, and the event of the thunderstorm, which had made her disposed to be uneasy the night before, fell back into its proper place in the scheme of things. The absence of the sirocco no doubt contributed to this calmer attitude, for, as a philosopher found out very long ago, it is possible to reach the soul through the subtle gateways of the body, and a thin light Athenian north wind is one of the subtlest physicians of the mind, and can find out the most tortuous and intricate passages through the house of our body. This acting on a naturally rational mind had produced its legitimate effect. Probably Tom had not noticed it; in any case, if he had, there were much less metaphysical reasons which would lend themselves to a much more obvious inference. She was tired, the lightning had dazzled her, Miss Vanderbilt was on her nerves; all these things were so likely, and the real reason so unlikely. Consequently, when she left the house after breakfast, to go up to the Acropolis and finish a sketch, with the almost certain probability of seeing Tom there, she felt that their intercourse would be as easy as usual.

The view she had chosen was of the little Niké temple seen through two headless columns of the Propylæa, with a glimpse behind of the sea and the hills of Argolis, and she painted on for half an hour or so without thinking of anything but what she was doing. But by degrees her glances at the far hills became longer, and the acts of painting shorter, her eyes saw less and less of what she was looking at, though they rested more intently on the scene, and at last she put down her palette and leant against the white marble wall behind her.

What was the matter with her? Why had she this unfathomable feeling for a man who was perhaps less unfathomable than any one she had ever seen? A frank English face, a keen boyish vitality, an almost comical self-sufficiency, demanding as its only food the contemplation of Greek sculpture—it all seemed fathomable enough. She half wished he would go back to England at once, yet even with that view in front of her, for the sake of which she nominally climbed up to the Acropolis, she felt that another factor was wanting, a nought, she told herself, which had the inexplicable trick of turning her units into tens. In any case she would go back to England not with him, but by herself. He was spoiling everything for her. Then came the reaction. “How ridiculous it will be! I asked him when he was going back, and hoped we might go together, and now I am deciding not to go with him. He is a most pleasant companion, and what is he to me”—the next thought came like an echo—“or I to him?”

Her thoughts had taken the bits in their mouths, and were running away, and so, metaphorically speaking, she jumped off the runaway vehicle and came into serious collision with terra firma; literally, she took up her palette and went on with her painting.

To Tom, also, his visits to the Acropolis distinctly gained something by the constant expectation of meeting Maud there. She had run him to ground the other day when she had made him confess that he cared for nothing but his art, and though the conclusion had been forced from his mouth, he knew it was not quite true. What he cared for was life and its best possibilities in the way of beauty, and his enthusiasm, he knew, saw and tended to state everything too violently. He found Maud sympathetic, eager and charming as a companion, and no other thought had entered his head about her, until the incident of the thunderstorm, which had been unexpected and very bewildering. And in his deep perplexity as to what he had better do, he took the eminently straightforward and most promising course of doing nothing at all, of behaving normally. He had, as it were, taken a tentative mental sounding of his feelings towards her for his own satisfaction, but he found that the bottom was soon reached. In any case the depths were not unplumbable, which would have been the only reason for doing anything. He was in love with life, with all of life that was best, and the idea of falling in love with any particular little bit of it would have seemed to him as incredible as writing sonnets, in the style of the eighteenth-century poets, to women’s finger-nails; and these always appeared to him most profitless performances. To fall in love must always seem slightly ridiculous until one falls in love.

Then it came about that not long after Maud had begun painting again, Tom walked up the steps as usual, and sat with his hands clasped round one knee, on the steps at Maud’s feet, and talked as usual, and absorbed the beauty of the scene.

“It’s the only way,” he said on this particular morning, “to hope to get hold, of the spirit of Greek art. You can never arrive at the spirit of a thing through its details—the details shape themselves if you know the spirit. You see artists in the Louvre copying Raphael all their lives, but they never really remind you of him. If they were to go to Umbrian villages and live the life he lived among the people, and to feast—I don’t mean literally—on the ox-eyed faces of peasant women and then come back, they might be able to copy him with some success, or still better, if they had genius, produce original pictures which were like Raphael’s. They go the wrong way about it.”

Maud was painting intently, and did not answer for a moment.

“Yes, I think you are right,” she said. “It’s no use copying merely. A mere copy only, at its best approximates to a coloured photograph.”

“It’s so utterly the wrong way to go about it,” said Tom. “To arrive at the right results, you have to follow the right method from the beginning. For instance, when I go back to England, and am shut up in a dingy studio under a grey sky, and my work looks hideous and dead, I shall bring back the inspiration not by thinking only of Hermes, but of the time I have spent here on these steps, looking out over the Propylæa to Salamis.”

He leant back on the step where he was sitting, and looked up at Maud for a moment. She put down the brush she held and was looking at him, as if she was waiting eagerly to hear something more. But Tom apparently was unconscious of her look, and she took up her brush again.

Tom tilted his hat a little more over his eyes, and took out his cigarette-case.

“It’s becoming real to me at last,” he said. “I think I am beginning to know what it all means.”

“You’ll have to show us,” said Maud. “A man who is a sculptor, and who knows what this means, is certainly bound to produce statues which are really like Greek statues.”

Tom sat up.

“I don’t care how conceited it sounds,” he said excitedly, “but I am going to try to do no less. It is astonishing how little I care what happens. That is my aim, and if I don’t realize it, it will be the fault of something I can’t control.”

“But what is there which a man who is earnest cannot control?” she asked.

“There is only one question in the world which is even harder to answer,” said Tom, “and that is, what is there in the world which he can control? What is to happen to me if some morning I wake up to find that I think Manvers’ statuettes ideal, and Greek art passé? How do I know it will not happen to me? Who will assure me of it?”

“Oh well, how do you know that you won’t wake up some morning, and find that your nose has disappeared during the night, and a hand grown in its place?” asked Maud. “The one is as unnatural to your mind as the other is to the body.”

“But all sorts of unnatural things happen to your mind,” said Tom. “That I should have suddenly felt that nothing but Greek art was worth anything was just as unnatural. It is just as unnatural that, at a given moment, a man falls in love——”

He stopped quite suddenly and involuntarily, but Maud’s voice broke in.

“Not at all,” she said. “You see, it happens to most men; it is the rule rather than the exception, whereas the disappearance of one’s nose would be unique, I should think.”

Her voice was so perfectly natural, so absolutely unaffected, that Tom made a short mental note, to the effect that Manvers was the greatest idiot in the world except one, which was a more consoling thought than he would have imagined possible. His determination to be quite normal had become entirely superfluous—a billetless bullet.

“Yes, but because it happens constantly, it makes it none the less extraordinary,” he said.

“Certainly not; but you can no longer call it unnatural.”

“I call everything unnatural that seems to me unintelligible,” remarked Tom, with crisp assurance.

Maud began to laugh.

“What a great many unnatural things there must be,” she said, “according to your view. Why, the sun rising in the morning is unnatural. But it would be much more unnatural if it did not.”

“If I go on, I shall soon begin to talk nonsense,” said Tom, concessively, “and that would be a pity.”

“Well, let’s get back on to safe ground,” said Maud. “Come and tell me what to do with that column. It isn’t right.”

Tom picked up his stick, and shoved his hat back on his head.

“I don’t understand you,” he said, after looking at the picture for a moment. “I believe you know what the spirit of all this is—at least, your picture, which is admirable, looks as if you did—and yet you like Manvers’ statuettes. I think you are unnatural.”

“Do you remember a talk we had, when we were staying with you, about being broad?”