ss of myself just now?
I mean, do you think people were sick with me?"

"What for?"

"I mean did I sound snobbish?" Avery pursued.

"Not more than anybody else," Michael assured him, and as he watched
Avery's expression of petulant self-reproach he wondered how it was
possible that once it mattered whether Avery knew he had a governess and
wore combinations instead of pants and vest.

"I say, aren't you rather keen on pictures? I heard you talking to
Wedderburn. Do come up to my room some time. I'm in Cloisters. Are you
going out? You'll have to buck up. It's after nine."

They had reached the lodge, and Michael, nodding good-night, was ushered
out by the porter. As he reached the corner of Longwall, Tom boomed his
final warning, and over the last echoing reverberation sounded here and
there the lisp of footsteps in the moonlight.

Michael wandered on in meditation. From lighted windows in the High came
a noise of laughter and voices that seemed to make more grave and more
perdurable the spires and towers of Oxford, deepening somehow the
solemnity of the black entries and the empty silver spaces before them.
Michael pondered the freshmen's chatter and apprehended dimly how this
magical sublunary city would convert all that effusion of naive
intolerance to her own renown. He stood still for a moment rapt in an
ecstasy of submission to this austere beneficence of stone that
sheltered even him, the worshiper of one day, with the power of an
immortal pride. He wandered on and on through the liquid moonshine,
gratefully conscious of his shadow that showed him in his cap and gown
not so conspicuous an intruder as he had seemed to himself that morning.

So for an hour he wandered in a tranced revelry of aspirations, until at
last breathlessly he turned into the tall glooms of New College Street
and Queen's Lane, where as he walked he touched the cold stones,
forgetting the world.

In the High he saw his own college washed with silver, and the tower
tremulous in the moonlight, fine-spun and frail as a lily.

It was pleasant to nod to one or two people standing in the lodge. It
was pleasant to turn confidently under the gateway of St. Cuthbert's
quad. It was pleasant to be greeted by his own name at the entrance of
his staircase. It was the greatest contentment he had ever known to see
the glowing of his fire, and slowly to untie under the red-shaded light
the fat parcels of his newly-bought books.

Outside in the Hi