For I could not but observe, further, that Mrs. Dynevor, and the Master himself, looked on at my intercourse with Alice complacently enough; that the former managed adroitly to throw us together, encouraged us to sing and read together, found opportunities for leaving us alone often—and too often. After all, I was no unfit match for her daughter. I was already a fellow and tutor of my College, with the prospect of a good college living hereafter: the prospect, if the Hartover interest did fail me—and fail me, I felt pretty sure for many reasons, it would not—of presentation to the first rich living in Lord Longmoor’s gift which might fall vacant if I chose to apply for it. I was as well born as the Master. He had made his way in the world, even as I was in the act of making mine, by personal ability and scholarship. Hence, on the score of station, there could be no valid objection to my suit. Should I then—for there were actually times when I began to ask myself this—renounce high romance, and the many sacrifices and sorrows which go along with it, and content myself with a comfortable country rectory and the company of an amiable and affectionate wife—a very respectable and respected manner of existence after all, with chances, moreover, of doing much good after a quiet unostentatious fashion? Who could blame me if I accepted such a future? No one, surely—unless I blamed myself. There was the crux, the rub. For should I not blame myself, and that increasingly as years went on, unless I renounced my present standards and declined upon altogether lower levels of thought and effort; unless, in fact, I allowed myself to sink into a certain moral and mental sloth—the sloth of one who, hearing, refuses the call to battle, preferring ignobly to ‘stay by the stuff’? Thus outwardly in lively and in pleasant intercourse, inwardly in travail of spirit and indecision, time passed until the end of the Lent term was well in sight. Then, one evening, when I had been dining at the house in Trumpington Street, as I bade the Master good-night, he told me that he, and Mrs. Dynevor and her daughters, intended to spend the vacation at Bath, and invited me to join the party as his guest. ‘You really must come, Brownlow,’ he said, ‘for my young ladies count upon your escort for the various expeditions they propose to make in the neighbourhood of the city of Bladud. They will be sadly put out if you desert us—and so, my dear fellow, shall I.’ He laid his hand kindly upon my shoulder.