r, the argument that might have gone on endlessly was quenched
suddenly by the vision of the night seen by Stella and Michael
simultaneously. They hung over the sill entranced, and Michael was so
closely held by the sorcery of the still air that he was ready to
surrender instantly his provocative standpoint of intolerance. The
contest between prejudice and sentiment was unequal in such conditions.
No one could fail to forgive the most outrageous pretender on such a
night; no one could wish for Stella better associates than the
moonstruck company which had entered so intangibly, had existed in
reality for a while so blatantly, but was now again dissolved into
elusive specters of a legendary paradise.

"I suppose what's really been the matter with me all the evening,"
confessed Michael, on the verge of going to bed, "is that I've felt out
of it all, not so much out of sympathy with them as acutely aware that
for them I simply didn't exist. That's rather galling. Now at Oxford,
supposing your friend Ayliffe were suddenly shot down among a lot of men
in my year, he would be out of sympathy with us, and we should be out of
sympathy with him, even up to the point of debagging him, but we should
all be uncomfortably aware of his existence. Seriously, Stella, why did
you send for me? Not surely just to show me off to these unappreciative
enthusiasts?"

"Perhaps I wanted a standard measure," Stella whispered, with a gesture
of disarming confidingness. "Something heavy and reliable."

"My dear girl, I'm much too much of a weathercock, or if you insist on
me being heavy, let's say a pendulum. And there's nothing quite so
confoundedly unreliable as either. Enough of gas. Good night."

There followed a jolly time in Paris, but for Michael it would have been
a jollier time if he could have let himself go with half the ridiculous
pleasure he had derived from lighting bonfires in St. Cuthbert's quad or
erecting a cocoanut shy in the Warden's garden. He was constantly aware
of a loss of dignity which worried him considerably and for which he
took himself to task very sternly. Finally he attributed it to one of
two reasons, either that he felt a sense of constraint in Stella's
presence on her account, or that his continued holding back was due to
his difficulty in feeling any justification for extravagant behavior,
when he had not the slightest intention of presenting the world with the
usufruct of his emotions in terms of letters or