ay to leckers?" Maurice suggested in a tone of
disappointment. Lonsdale arrived for breakfast at this moment, just in
time to prevent Michael's heart from being softened. The newcomer was at
once invited to remove the editor.

"Have you bought your copy of the O.L.G. yet, Lonny?" Maurice demanded,
unabashed.

"Look here, Moss Avery," said Lonsdale seriously, "if you promise to
spend the bob you screw out of me on buying yourself some soothing
syrup, I'll ..."

But the editor rejected the frivolous attentions of his audience, and
left the J.C.R. Michael, not thinking it very prudent to remind Lonsdale
of last night's encounter with Appleby, examined the copy of The Oxford
Looking-Glass that lay beside his plate.

It was a curious compound of priggishness and brilliance and
perspicacity and wit, this olive-green bantling so meticulously hatched,
and as Michael turned the pages and roved idly here and there among the
articles that by persevering exhortation had been driven into the fold
by the editor, he was bound to admit the verisimilitude of the image of
Oxford presented. Maurice might certainly be congratulated on the
variety of the opinions set on record, but whether he or that Academic
Muse whose biographies and sculptured portraits nowhere exist should be
praised for the impression of corporate unanimity that without question
was ultimately conveyed to the reader, Michael was not sure. It was a
promising fancy, this of the Academic Muse; and Michael played with the
idea of elaborating his conception in an article for this very
Looking-Glass which she invisibly supported. The Oxford Looking-Glass
might serve her like the aegis of Pallas Athene, an aegis that would
freeze to academic stone the self-confident chimeras of the twentieth
century. Michael began to feel that his classical analogies were
enmeshing the original idea, involving it already in complexities too
manifold for him to unravel. His ideas always fled like waking dreams at
the touch of synthesis. Perhaps Pallas Athene was herself the Academic
Muse. Well enough might the owl and the olive serve as symbols of
Oxford. The owl could stand for all the grotesque pedantry, all the
dismal hootings of age, all the slow deliberate sweep of the don's mind,
the seclusions, the blinkings in the daylight and the unerring
destruction of intellectual vermin; while the olive would speak of age
and the grace and grayness of age, of age each year made young again by