Twelve miles--six there and six back again--is a long walk for a student. He sent up his name, and asked whether he could be of any use, but he did not receive encouragement. Lady Markland sent her thanks, and was quite well ("she says," the old butler explained, with a shake of the head, so that no one might believe he agreed in anything so unbecoming). The Honourable John had been telegraphed for, her husband's uncle, and everything was being done; so that there was no need to trouble Mr. Warrender. He went back, scarcely solaced by his walk. He wanted to be doing something. Not Plato; in the circumstances Plato did not answer at all. When he opened his book his thoughts escaped from him, and went off with a bound to matters entirely different. How was it possible that he could give that undivided attention which divine philosophy requires, the day after his father's funeral, the first day of his independent life, the day after----! That extraordinary postscript to the agitations of yesterday told, perhaps, most of all. When the girls asked him to read to them, opening the book at the page where they had left off, and preparing to tell him all that had gone before, so that he might understand the story ("although there is very little story," Minnie said, with satisfaction; "chiefly thoughts upon serious subjects"), he jumped up from his chair in almost fierce rebellion against that sway of the ordinary of which his mother had spoken. "You were right," he said to her; "the common routine is the thing that outlasts everything. I never thought of it before, but it is true." Mrs. Warrender, though she had herself been quivering with the long-concentrated impatience for which it seemed even now there could be no outlet, was troubled by her son's outburst, and, afraid of what it might come to, felt herself moved to take the other side. "It is very true," she said, faltering a little, "but the common routine is often best for everything, Theo. It is a kind of leading-string, which keeps us going." The girls looked up at Theo with alarm and wonder, but still they were not shocked at what _he_ said. He was a man; he had come to the Warren from those wild excitements of Oxford life, of which they had heard with awe; they gazed at him, trying to understand him. "I have always heard," said Minnie, "that reading aloud was the most tranquillising thing people could do. If we had each a book it would be unsociable; but when a book is read aloud, then we are all thinking about the same thing, and it draws us together;" which was really the most sensible judgment that could have been delivered, had the two fantastic ones been in the mood to understand what was said.