They overran the place instantaneously. You met them with their brown canvas satchels and japanned tin specimen-cases, poking about up the Trwyn or groping in the boggy patches about Sarn. They were to be met in the lanes, carrying picnic paraphernalia. They lighted fires of driftwood on the shore, which coatless young men blew while the young women combed their hair out in the sun. And wherever they went a little red rash went with them, the rash of the small red-backed book, Sir Thomas More's _Utopia_, of which the contagion had raged among them. Not that they had not books of other hues also. They had Hugh Miller's _Old Red Sandstone_ in green, and _Selected Sayings_ of Marcus Aurelius in brown, and others in various colours; but it was the red that struck the eye at the greater distance. They and the books were inseparable. The unmarried ones, sharing a book between them, seemed already to be creating that sage community of intellectual interest that, as all the world knows, comes in so very handy when the first fires of love have become less devouringly hot; the married ones, with a book apiece, kept the calm connubial ideal before the maids' and bachelors' eyes.... And it was all exceedingly disquieting and difficult to understand. One hoped that the books were portals into high and fair and spacious places, but feared that they might be but pathetic posterns of escape from the world's weary drudgery that has got to be done and that therefore somebody must do. One had struggles of compunction and abasement and doubt, and the humiliating feeling that some clean and heathery and wind-swept place of the mind was being invaded to sadly, sadly little purpose. One tried, desperately tried, to tell oneself that if poor lame Harry Stone got one single half-hour's joy out of it all, nothing else mattered; and then one wondered whether even this was true. It is hard to be social over an anti-social thing.... So one bore, humble heart and arrogant heart alike, each his portion of Education's shame.