Prescott and he walked along the arcade toward Albany Courtyard. “I say,” said Michael, with his foot on the step of the hansom, “I think I must have talked an awful lot of rot to-night.” “No, no, no, my dear boy; I’ve been very much interested,” insisted Prescott. And all the jingling way home Michael tried to rescue from the labyrinth of his memory some definite conversational thread that would lead him to discover what he could have said that might conceivably have mildly entertained his host. “Nothing,” he finally decided. Next morning Michael met Alan at Paddington, and they went up to Oxford with all the rich confidence of a term’s maturity. Even in the drizzle of a late January afternoon the city assumed in place of her eternal and waylaying beauty a familiarity that for Michael made her henceforth more beautiful. After hall Avery came up to Michael’s room, and while the rain dripped endlessly outside, they talked lazily of life with a more clearly assured intimacy than either of them could have contemplated the term before. Michael spoke of the new house, of his sister Stella, of his dinner with Prescott at the Albany, almost indeed of the circumstances of his birth, so easy did it seem to talk to Avery deep in the deep chair before the blazing fire. He stopped short, however, at his account of the dinner. “You know, I think I should like to turn ultimately into a Prescott,” he affirmed. “I think I should be happy living in rooms at the Albany without ever having done a very great deal. I should like to feel I was perfectly in keeping with my rooms and my friends and my servant.” “But you wouldn’t be,” Avery objected, “if you thought about it.” “No, but I shouldn’t think about it,” Michael pointed out. “I should have steeled myself all my life not to think about it, and when your eldest son comes to see me, Maurice, and drinks a little too much champagne and talks as fast as his father used to talk, I shall know just exactly how to make him feel that after all he isn’t quite the silly ass he will be inclined to think himself about the middle of his third cigar.” Michael sank farther back into the haze of his pipe and, contemplating dreamily the Mona Lisa, made up his mind that she would not become his outlook thirty years hence. Some stern old admiral with his hand on the terrestrial globe and a naval engagement in the background would better suit his mantelpiece. “I wonder what I shall be like at fifty,” he sighed. “It depends what you do in between nineteen and fifty,” said Avery. “You can’t possibly settle down at the Albany as soon as you leave the Varsity. You’ll have to do something.” “What, for example?” Michael asked. “Oh, write perhaps.” “Write!” Michael scoffed. “Why, when I can read all these”—he pointed to his bookshelves—“and all the dozens and dozens more I intend to buy, what a fool I should be to waste my time in writing.”