Vadis?_ _By Nigel Stewart._

Nigel's plea for the inspiration of modernity to make more vital the
decorative Anglicanism whose cause he had pledged his youth to advance,
was with all its predetermined logic and emphasis of rhetorical
expression an appealing document. Michael did not think it would greatly
serve the purpose for which it had been written, but its presence in The
Oxford Looking-Glass was a guarantee that the youngest magazine was not
going to ignore the force that perhaps more than any other had endowed
Oxford with something that Cambridge for all her poets lacked. Michael
himself had since he came up let the practice of religion slide, but his
first fervors had not burned themselves out so utterly as to make him
despise the warmth they once had kindled. His inclination in any
argument was always toward the Catholic point of view, and though he
himself allowed to himself the license of agnostic speech and agnostic
thought, he was always a little impatient of a skeptical non-age and
very contemptuous indeed of an unbelief which had never been tried by
the fire of faith. He did not think Stewart's challenge with its
plaintive under-current of well-bred pessimism would be effective save
for the personality of the writer, who revealed his formal grace
notwithstanding the trumpeting of his young epigrams and the tassels of
his too conspicuous style. With all the irritation of its verbal
cleverness, he rejoiced to read _Quo Vadis_? and he felt in reading it
that Oxford would still have silver plate to melt for a lost cause.

Under the stimulus of Nigel Stewart's article, Michael managed to finish
his breakfast with an appetite. As he rose to leave the Common Room,
Lonsdale emerged from the zareba of illustrated papers with which he had
fortified his place at table.

"Have you been reading that thing of Mossy's?" he asked incredulously.

Michael nodded.

"Isn't it most awful rot?"

"Some of it," Michael assured him.

"I suppose it would be only sporting to buy a copy," sighed Lonsdale. "I
suppose I ought to buzz round and buck the college up into supporting
it. By Jove, I'll write and tell the governor to buy a copy. I want him
to raise my allowance this year, and he'll think I'm beginning to take
an interest in what he calls 'affairs.'"

Michael turned into Venner's before going back to his own rooms.

"Hullo, is that the paper?" asked Venner. "Dear me, this looks very
learned. You should tell him to p