And the old adventurer, whose eyes had gazed upon so many and so foreign cities, was silent, seeing of a sudden that youth must have its day nor will be gainsaid. * * * * * But despite his triumphs, Gaveston was not completely satisfied. What did it all mean to _him_, this blazing, roaring Babylon? How was it all to fit into the intricate mosaic of _élan_ and _flair_ and _verve_ that made up the essential ffoulis. London and Oxford.… Oxford and London.… “They seem irreconcilable,” he whispered to himself one evening as he stood adream by the fountain in Piccadilly Circus, the high tide of humanity plashing in dusky waves about him. But were they? And with a touch of elfin phantasy all his own, he interchanged in his robust imagination the two sculptured monuments of these two irreconcilable cities, and hey presto!--below the monacal mullions of Wallace he perceived the ever-tiptoe Eros, aiming his darts with fatal strategy at the haunters of those mediæval shadows and destroying in a night an austerity that was the handiwork of unnumbered centuries--while here, round the transplanted Martyrs’ Memorial the flower-sellers would cease their raucousness, and the struggling painted crowd their Neronian debauchery, awed into silence before the steepling and pinnacled emblem of Oxford’s and England’s rejection of the Scarlet Woman of the Seven Hills.… “Vi’lets, sweet vi’lets … all fresh.… Buy a bunch, kind sir!” the shrill cockney voice had floated to his ears from the pedestal behind him. He threw the poor wretch a sovereign, and hurried over to Regent Street, fearing the embarrassing cordiality of her humble gratitude.[8] [8] Mr. Budd, when asked to record in his friends’ albums his favourite proverb, would always inscribe _Noblesse Oblige_. (LIT. EXEC.) But how was this evening, almost his last before term began, to be spent? He pondered a moment as he stood in the flare of the shouting sky-signs. What a day of rich and original imaginings it had been! Heedless of time, he had wandered round and round the Surrey Docks, watching the ships and the men of the ships. All afternoon his thoughts had set sail with those Levantine brigantines as they fared forth in silence down to the open sea, and had followed them to strange and hidden ports of Cathay and Samarkand; and in imagination he had charged their cavernous holds with who knows what marvellous cargoes of spikenard and julep, attar and bergamot, and with what heavy carven chests of teak and sandalwood, stuffed with the blinding glory of onyx and sard, of beryl and jacinth and peridot, of the girasole shining green in the sun and red in the moon, and the zircon which drives mad the Lybian antelopes that look upon it in the spring, of the wan crapawd, the cabochon and the obsidian, and with carcanets of sapphire and torques of purest spinel.…