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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
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