One may perhaps take these things too hard and read into them foolish fancies; but the hush in question was filled to my imagination—quite apart from the listening faces, of which there would be special things to say that I wouldn’t for the world risk—with the great picture of all the old grey quads and old green gardens, of all the so totally different traditions and processions that were content at last, if only for the drowsy end of a summer afternoon, to range themselves round and play at hospitality. What it appeared possible to make out was a certain faint convergence: that was the idea of which, during the whole process, I felt the agreeable obsession. From the moment it brushed the mind certainly the impulse was to clutch and detain it: too doleful would it have been to entertain for an instant the fear that M. Bourget’s lecture could leave the two elements of his case facing each other only at the same distance at which it had found them. No, no; there was nothing for it but to assume and insist that with each tick of the clock they moved a little nearer together. That was the process, as I have called it, and none the less interesting to the observer that it may not have been, and may not yet be, rapid, full, complete, quite easy or clear or successful. It was the seed of contact that assuredly was sown; it was the friendly beginning that in a manner was made. The situation was handled and modified—the day was a date. I shall perhaps remain obscure unless I say more expressly and literally that the particular thing into which, for the perfect outsider, the occasion most worked was a lively interest—so far as an outsider could feel it—in the whole odd phenomenon and spectacle of a certain usual positive _want_ of convergence, want of communication between what the seat and habit of the classics, the famous frequentation and discipline, do for their victims in one direction and what they do not do for them in another. Was the invitation to M. Bourget not a dim symptom of a bridging of this queerest of all chasms? I can only so denominate—as a most anomalous gap—the class of possibilities to which we owe its so often coming over us in England that the light kindled by the immense academic privilege is apt suddenly to turn to thick smoke in the air of contemporary letters.