The two men stood side by side for a long time without speaking, Raine leaning on his elbow, blowing great puffs of smoke that curled lazily outwards in the stillness, and the Junior Dean with his hands behind his back. “We ought to be accounted happy,” said the latter, meditatively. “This life of ours--” “Yes, it approaches Euthanasia sometimes,” replied Raine, allusively--“or it would, if one gave way to it.” “I can't see that,” rejoined the other. “A life of scholarly ease is not death--the charm of it lies in its perfect mingling of cloistered seclusion with the idyllic. Here, for instance”--with a wave of a delicate hand--“is Arden without its discomforts.” “I am afraid I am not so 'deep-contemplative' as you,” said Raine, with a smile, “and the idyllic always strikes me as a bit flimsy. I never could lie under a tree and pretend to read Theocritus. I'd sooner read Rabelais over a fire.” “I think you're ungrateful, Chetwynd. Where, out of Oxford--Cambridge, perhaps--could you get a scene like this? And not the scene alone, but the subtle spirit of it? It seems always to me thought-haunted. We have grown so used to it that we do not appreciate sufficiently the perfect conditions around us for the development of all that is spiritual in us--apart from 'the windy ways of men.'” “The 'windy ways of men' are very much better for us, if you ask me,” replied Raine. “I mean 'men' really and not technically,” he added, with a smile and a thought of undergraduate vanity. “Ah, but with this as a haven of refuge--the grey walls, the cool cloisters, the peaceful charm of rooms like these looking out on to these beautiful, untroubled gardens.” “I don't know,” said Raine. “Loving Oxford as I do, I sometimes breathe more freely out of it. There is too much intellectual _mise en scène_ in all this. If you get it on your mind that you are expected to live up to it, you are rapidly qualifying yourself for the newest undergraduate culture-society, at a college that shall be nameless. Many a man is ruined by it.” “But, my dear Chetwynd,” said the Junior Dean, “there is a difference between loving 'to walk the studious cloysters pale' and intellectual priggishness.” “Doubtless. But it isn't everyone who can walk honestly. The danger lies in finding another fellow doing the same. Then the two of you join together and say how beautiful it is, and you call in a third to share the sensation, and you proceed to admire yourselves as being vastly superior meditative persons. Then finally, according to modern instinct, you throw it into a Pale Cloyster Company, Limited, which is Anathema.” “Switzerland will do you good, Chetwynd,” remarked the Junior Dean quickly. “Particularly as your mind is so disorganized as to misinterpret Milton.” Raine laughed, stretched himself lazily after the manner of big men, and lounged back on the window-sill, his hands in his pockets.