At what is temperate and modest he throws satire with a bitterness enhanced by a secret affection for what he lapidates. Like a man who should paint an angel and call it a thief, he narrowly pursues his own choicest veiled gifts with a malicious word. In short, his brilliant conversation proves how much easier it is to think what one says than to say what one thinks. Yet is he now a harder student than he has ever been, and allows nothing to disturb him at his books. He has nodded at European literatures through half their courses, in the lonely hours when his companions are asleep. He is planning again, and realises that it would be a showy thing to get a first class. His conversation becomes gloomy as well as bitter. People suspect that he means what he says; and he mutters in explanation that experience is the basis of life and the ruin of philosophies. His friends simply accept the remark as untrue. He is now often reduced to silence among those who sleep well. He no longer pours a current of fresh and illuminating thought upon things which he not only does not understand, but does not care for, in politics or art. He slips out of brilliant company, to enter occasionally among religious circles where they are tolerant of lost sheep, and has begun to pay his smaller bills and to find out what books he must read for a degree, when the examination day arrives. Then he borrows his old dignified look of indolence in the sultry schools, while he writes hard, and secures a second class by means of a legible handwriting, clear style, and amusing irrelevance. He goes down, alone, still with a fascinating tongue, desperate, and yet careless of success, ready to do anything so long as he can escape comfortable and conventional persons, and quite unable to be anything conspicuous, but a man who has been to the garden of the Hesperides and brought back apples that he alone can make appear to be golden in his rare moments of health. III He is one who knows that three or four years at the University is a good investment. He comes up with an open scorn of idlers, both gilded and gifted. Whether he is clever and successful or not, he has a suspicion that dons are underworked, colleges expensive hotels or worse, and is determined to change all that. Not infrequently such a one is perverted by a happy evening with a few acquaintances, early in his first term. If he is not, he is a white elephant. The dons are alarmed by his instructions, the undergraduates by his clothes. “If this were not an old conservative creek,” he seems to say, “promotion would go by merit, and I should soon be at the top of the tree and begin repairs.” But the University remains unchanged. He looks about him for a more stealthy passage to his ends.