The boy’s religious sense is deepened by a visit that he pays, for the sake of curing a boyish ailment, to a neighbouring temple of Aesculapius, where he listens to the mystical discourse of a young priest. He is shown through a sliding panel a retired long-drawn valley, lit with sunlight and closed by a misty mountain, which gives him a strong sense of the unsuspected presence of the unseen in life. His mother dies; and he himself goes to Pisa to school, where he lives a somewhat isolated life, with dreams of literary fame. “While all the heart (of his fellow-scholars) was in their limited boyish race, and its transitory prizes, he was already entertaining himself, very pleasurably meditative, with the tiny drama in action before him, as but the mimic, preliminary exercise for a larger contest, and already with an implicit epicureanism.” His view of life is coloured by an intense boyish attachment to a school friend Flavian, a wayward, self-absorbed, brilliant boy, with a strong taste for euphuistic literature, and of sceptical tendency. Flavian’s life is already tainted by sensuality: “How often, afterwards, did evil things present themselves in malign association with the memory of that beautiful head, and with a kind of borrowed sanction and charm in its natural grace!” But Marius by a certain coldness and fastidiousness of temperament preserves his purity untouched. And Marius here learns his first lessons in Epicureanism of the higher kind. “He was acquiring what it is the chief function of all higher education to impart, the art, namely, of so relieving the ideal or poetic traits, the elements of distinction, in our everyday life—of so exclusively living in them—that the unadorned remainder of it, the mere drift or _débris_ of our days, comes to be as though it were not.” But it was not the prescribed studies of the school that gave him his hints of beauty. “If our modern education, in its better efforts, really conveys to any of us that kind of idealising power, it does so (though dealing mainly, as its professed instruments, with the most select and ideal remains of ancient literature) oftenest by truant reading; and thus it happened also, long ago, with Marius and his friend.” Then comes Marius’ literary training in association with Flavian. He learns to appreciate the delicate manipulation of words, the sharp impression, the exclusion of all “that was but middling, tame, or only half-true,” the refinement of what is already refined, the fastidious correctness of form, the principle that “to know when one’s self is interested, is the first condition of interesting other people.” And this brings Marius to the knowledge of the necessity of scrupulous independence in literary taste.