e Street, and arm in arm they walked into the Proctor
outside the Ratcliffe Camera. To him they admitted their membership of
the university. To him they proffered very politely their names and the
names of their colleges, and with the same politeness agreed to visit
him next morning. The Proctor raised his cap and with his escort faded
into the fog. Arm in arm the six journalists continued their progress
into Holywell. Guy had digs in an old house whose gabled front leaned
outward, whose oriel windows were supported by oaken beams worm-eaten
and grotesquely carved. Within, a wide balustraded staircase went
billowing upward unevenly. Guy's room that he shared with two
intellectual athletes from his own college was very large. It was
paneled all round up to the ceiling, and it contained at least a dozen
very comfortable armchairs. He had imposed upon his partners his own
tastes and with that privilege had cut off electric light and gas, so
that lit only by two Pompeian lamps, the room was very shadowy when they
all came in.

"Comeragh and Anstruther are working downstairs, I expect," Guy
explained, as one by one, while his guests waited in the dim light, he
made a great illumination with wax candles. Then he poked up the fire
and set glasses ready for anyone's need. Great armchairs were pulled
round in a semicircle: pipes were lit: the stillness and mystery of the
Oxford night crept along the ancient street, a stillness which at
regular intervals was broken by multitudinous chimes, or faintly now and
then by passing footfalls. Unexcited by argument the talk rippled in
murmurous contentment.

Michael was in no mood himself for talking, and he sat back listening
now and then, but mostly dreaming. He thought of the conversation in
that long riverside room in Paris with its extravagance and
pretentiousness. Here in this time-haunted Holywell Street was neither.
To be sure, Christianity and the soul's immortality and the future of
England and contemporary art were running the gauntlet of youth's
examination, but the Academic Muse had shown the company her aegis, had
turned everything to unpassionate stone, and softened all presumption
with her guarded glances. It was extraordinary how under her guidance
every subject was stripped of obtrusive reality, how even women,
discussed never so grossly, remained untarnished; since they ceased to
be real women, but mere abstractions wanton or chaste in accordance with
the demands of w