Had he cared, he might have pictured to himself the other adventurers he had known, who had ridden out in the same brave belief that life was romantic: Jehane, who had looked from the window across the street and had beckoned with her eyes, only to give a husband to another woman; Ocky Waffles, who had come to her as the feeble substitute for the nobility she had coveted; his mother and father for whom, despite its kindness, life had proved a pedestrian affair. But, on his first night in this city of dreamers, he saw, stretching away below him, wide landscapes of illusion. There was so much to do, so much to experience, so much to dare. The spreading of wings had brought him to a crag from which he viewed, not the catastrophe of sunsets, but the riot of morning boiling up against cloud-precipices and pouring ensaffroned and clamorous across the world. He saw only the glory of its challenge, nothing of its threat. In the weeks that followed his belief in the marvelousness of mere living was quickened. The head and shoulders of the marvel were that, for the first time, he was lord of his own existence. Like God, he could create himself. Mr. Thing, the tutor-bird, advised him, in a sneering tone of voice, that he had a chance of a first in Honor Mods. Mr. Thing had become embittered by past experience with other brilliant students. “If you don't take to drink and to yowling like a cat of nights, you may do it, Mr. Barrington. But I expect you'll run wild like the rest.” Peter was claimed by Roy Hardcastle, the captain of the boats. His breadth and height, and slightness of hip marked him as a potential oarsman. Every afternoon he ran down through the meadows to the barges, there to be tubbed and sworn at by the coaches. He rowed in the Junior Fours as stroke and won his race. He was chosen as stroke for the Toggers--after that his career as an athlete was settled. Calvary men began to prophesy a rowing future for him. He noticed that men, not of his own college, paused on the bank to watch his style as his eight swung by. The keenness of Oxford life awoke him to his powers; the contempt in which slackers were held spurred him forward. He had never been called upon to test his personality in competition with others. The experience took him out of himself, but beneath externals he remained the same simple-hearted, compassionate idealist. He was different from other men, and other men knew it. Perhaps it was that he was uncivilized, as the golden woman had told him--uncivilized in the sense of being unsophisticated and intense. Perhaps it was that his standards were pitched high, and that he was chivalrous in his attitude of cleanness toward himself. At all events, it never entered his head that the sowing of wild oats was a legitimate employment. Men stopped talking about certain adventures when he was present.