'It is a constant going over the same ground--in itself a maddening process. No sooner do the boys reach a certain age and proficiency and become slightly more interesting than they go on to somebody else, and you begin again at the beginning with another batch. You teach in a bare-walled room with enormous glaring windows, and the ring of the electric tram-bell in the street below makes the commas in your sentences. You have been doing this every day for thirty years. The boys you taught at first are fathers of families now. The trees in the playground have grown from striplings into big shady things. Everything has gone on, and so have you--but you have only gone on getting drier and more bored.' 'Continue,' said he, smiling. 'Your intelligence,' said I, coming down a little nearer, 'restless at first, and for ever trying to push green shoots through the thick rind of routine--' 'Good. Quite good. Continue.' '--through to a wider space, a more generous light--' 'Poetic. Quite poetic. My compliments.' 'Thank you. Your intelligence, then, for ever--for ever--you've interrupted me, and I don't know where I'd got to.' 'You have got to my intelligence having green shoots.' 'Oh, yes. Well, they're not green now. That's the point I've been stumbling toward. They ought to be, if you had taken bigger handfuls of leisure and had not wholly wasted your time drudging. But now they ought to be more than shoots--great trees, in whose shade we all would sit gratefully, and you enjoying free days, with the pleasant memory of free years behind you and the cheerful hope of roomy years to come. And during all that time of your imprisonment in a class-room the world outside went on its splendid way, the seasons filled it with beauty which you were not there to see, the sun shone and warmed other people, the winds blew and made other people's flesh tingle and their blood dance--you, of course, were cramped up with cold feet and a headache--the birds sang to other people tunes of heaven, while in your ears buzzed only the false quantities of reluctant little boys, the delicious rain--' 'Stop, stop. You forget I had to earn a living.' 'Of course you had. But you know you earned your _living_ long ago. What you are earning now is much more like your dying--the dying, the atrophy of your soul. What does it matter if your wife has one bonnet less a year, and no silk dress--' 'Do not let her hear you,' he said, glancing round. '--or if you keep no servant, and have less to eat on Sundays than your neighbors, give no parties, and don't cumber yourselves up with acquaintances who care nothing for you? If you gave up these things you could also give up drudging. You are too old to drudge. You have been too old these twenty years. A man of your brains--' he pretended to look grateful--'who cannot earn enough between twenty and thirty to keep him from the necessity of slaving for the rest of his days is not--is not--' 'Worthy of the name of man?'