"That's all you ever say. Childish! You with your Athanasian Creed and incense and swindling priests. Ever been to Notre Dame and seen the advertisements? Forty days' purgatory remitted in return for so many prayers! And you call me childish!" Lawrence had a fine flow of metaphors and expletives. He had been known to continue one sentence for ten minutes, his oratorical method being to substitute copulas for full stops. He began jerkily, it is true. But once the lumbering coach was set moving nothing could withstand its impetus. Rendell yielded and began to discuss with Davenant the personality of Christ. Lawrence continued roaring at no one in particular. At last he sat heavily down in his arm-chair, so heavily that one of its legs gave way. He tore off the broken member and brandished it wildly, as a symbol of his attitude to all things episcopal. As usual it was Chard who closed the discussion. "Davenant's faith," he said, "makes me think of a mendicant professor of aesthetics and Rendell's of the first secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners (Nazareth branch). I move the question be put." His advice was taken. "Beer," said Lawrence. "My god, more beer." And so the evenings would begin. III Incredibly the Push were blind to their amazing superficiality. Even had they suffered from an inclination to be serious, life came so easily and so rapidly that it would have been impossible to do anything but play with it. So they trifled with wisdom and trifled rightly. For when a man is only nineteen and has enough to eat and drink, and more than enough to read and say, it were a crime to stop in thought and laboriously dam the pleasant shallows of an easy-going stream. Alike in the winter nights by Lawrence's fire or by the lingering twilights of early summer when they threaded a maze of back-waters or lay in the cool fastness of the college garden listening to the wind in the great elms or the tinkle of a distant piano, they built great castles of argument, flimsy and fantastic piles untouched by reality and doomed to fade away at the coming of Experience. They talked of great things and small, of God and Woman and sometimes of Man, of futures and careers, of the dons, of the college, of the varsity teams, of books and plays and poets, of the coldness of the pretty girl in this shop and of the wantonness of the plain girl in that.