re all
provided for. In your first term at Oxford. No responsibilities except
the ordinary responsibilities of an ordinary gentleman. Got a charming
sister. Why, you might do anything."

"What, for example?" queried Michael.

"Oh, I don't know. There's the Diplomatic Service. But don't be in a
hurry. Wait a bit. Have a good time. Your allowance is to be four
hundred a year at St. Mary's. And when you're twenty-one you come into
roughly seven hundred a year of your own, and ultimately you'll have at
least two thousand a year. But don't be a young ass. You've been brought
up quietly. You haven't _got_ to cut a dash. Don't get in a mess with
women, and, if you do, come and tell me before you try to get out of
it."

"I don't care much about women," said Michael. "They're disappointing."

"What, already?" exclaimed Prescott, putting up his eyeglass.

Michael murmured a dark assent. The glass of champagne that owing to the
attention of the soldier-servant was always brimming, the dark discreet
room, and the Albany's atmosphere of passion squeezed into the mold of
contemporary decorum or bound up to stand in a row of Thackeray's books,
all combined to affect Michael with the idea that his life had been
lived. He felt himself to belong to the period of his host, and as the
rubied table glowed upon his vision more intensely, he beheld the old
impressionable Michael, the nervous, the self-conscious, the sensitive
slim ghost of himself receding out of sight into the gloom. Left behind
was the new Michael going up to the Varsity to-morrow morning for his
second term, going up with the assurance of finding delightful friends
who would confirm his distaste for the circumscribed past. Only a
recurrent apprehension that under the table he seemed called upon to
manage a number of extra legs, or perhaps it was only a slight
uncertainty as to which leg was crossed over the other at the moment,
made him wonder very gently whether after all some of this easy
remoteness were not due to the champagne. The figure of his host was
receding farther and farther every moment, and his conversation reached
Michael across a shimmering inestimable space of light, while finally he
was aware of his own voice talking very rapidly and with a half-defiant
independence of precisely what he wished to say. The evening swam past
comfortably, and gradually from the fumes of the cigar smoke the figure
of Prescott leaning back in his shadowy armchair took on