My mother shook her head. “The enthusiasm for it is gone,” she said sadly. “This generation of undergraduates doesn’t seem to take much interest in that kind of thing. I don’t really know,” she added, “what it _is_ interested in.” What indeed, I reflected. In my young days it had been Social Service and Fabianism; it had been long hearty walks in the country at four and a half miles an hour, with draughts of Five X beer at the end of them, and Rabelaisian song and conversations with yokels in incredibly picturesque little wayside inns; it had been reading parties in the Lakes and climbing in the Jura; it had been singing in the Bach Choir and even—though somehow I had never been able quite to rise to that—even morris dancing with Mr. Toft.... But Fading is a fine dance, and all these occupations seemed now a little queer. Still, I caught myself envying the being who had lived within my skin and joined in these activities. “Poor Toft!” I meditated. “Do you remember the way he had of calling great men by little pet names of his own? Just to show that he was on terms of familiarity with them, I suppose. Shakespeare was always Shake-bake, which was short, in its turn, for Shake-Bacon. And Oven, _tout court_, was Beethoven.” “And always J. S. B. for Bach,” my mother continued, smiling elegiacally. “Yes, and Pee Em for Philipp Emanuel Bach. And Madame Dudevant for George Sand, or, alternatively, I remember ‘The Queen’s Monthly Nurse’—because Dickens thought she looked like that the only time he saw her.” I recalled the long-drawn and delighted laughter which used to follow that allusion. “You were never much of a dancer, dear boy.” My mother sadly shook her head over the past. “Ah, but at any rate,” I answered, “at any rate I was a Fabian. And I went for hearty long walks in the country. I drank my pint of Five X at the Red Lion.” “I wish you could have gone without the beer,” said my mother. That I had not chosen to be a total abstainer had always a little distressed her. Moreover, I had a taste for beefsteaks. “It was my substitute for morris dancing, if you follow me.” But I don’t think she did follow me. We took two or three turns up and down the lawn in silence. “How is your paper doing?” she asked at last. I told her with a great show of enthusiasm about the cross between Angoras and Himalayans which we had just announced. “I often wish,” she said after a pause, “that you had accepted the college’s offer. It would have been so good to have you here, filling the place your dear father occupied.” She looked at me sadly. I smiled back at her as though from across a gulf. The child, I thought, grows up to forget that he is of the same flesh with his parents; but they do not forget. I wished, for her sake, that I were only five years old. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER IV