It does not last, of course, this intense nostalgia. No young man can live for very long in the past. New interests come to him, he finds new fields for his ambition. He makes friends in his office. He joins a tennis club, he takes dancing lessons. He sets out in search of life. He ceases, at every vacant moment of the day, to compute what he would be doing were he at school instead of at an office. He thinks of the innings he intends to play next Saturday: his eyes pick out on the carpet an imaginary spot ten feet away from him, and he considers what shot he would play to a ball that pitched on it; he also perhaps wonders what exactly that charming lady with whom he had danced the night before, had meant when she had said, with a peculiar inflection in her voice: 'You're growing up.' His correspondence with his old friends becomes spasmodic. He no longer writes to his house master once a month. The arrival of a letter with the school crest on it ceases to excite him as it did. The school magazine becomes full of names that are meaningless to him. He notes with disgust that Baxter, in his day a miserable little squirt, has got into the Eleven; and that that goggle-eyed ass, Barton, is head of the school. He asks himself at Christmas whether it is worth his while to renew his subscription, and decides that it is not. From time to time he reads in _The Sportsman_ of the feats of his school Fifteen, and remarks without enthusiasm that 'Fernhurst must be pretty strong this year.' His school life has dropped from him as a coat that he has outgrown. It belongs to the past, and he is living in the future. School will not mean much to him for another twenty years, till the time comes, that is to say, when he will have to send his son to school. Then will he recover his youth, and live again his school days in his son, only more intensely, because he will be living them in his imagination. In the achievements of his son he will recognise the ghost of his old ambitions. His son's career will be more personal to him than his own. He will take more pleasure in his son's successes than the boy will himself. Indeed a great deal of a boy's pleasure in his success lies in his appreciation of the happiness that it will bring to his father. At no time in their lives do father and son come so close to one another as during these years. And it is at first sight surprising that this intimacy should not produce that common ground on which difficulties may be openly discussed and quarrels healed. For in spite of this intimacy, the relations between father and son are very often superficial.