ichael. "It would be fun to see
Maurice living in Grosvenor Road with all the Muses. Castleton will have
such a time tidying up after them when he joins him next year."

But Stella would not go.

CHAPTER XIV

99 ST. GILES

It was strange to come up to Oxford and to find so many of the chief
figures in the college vanished. For a week Michael felt that in a way
he had no business still to be there, so unfamiliar was the college
itself inhabited by none of his contemporaries save a few Scholars. Very
soon, however, the intimacy of the rooms in St. Giles which he shared
with Alan cured all regrets, and with a thrill he realized that this
last year was going to be of all the years at Oxford the best, indeed
perhaps of all the years of his life the best.

College itself gave Michael a sharper sense of its entity than he had
ever gathered before. He was still sufficiently a part of it not to feel
the implicit criticism of his presence that in a year or two, revisiting
Oxford, he would feel; and he was also far enough away from the daily
round to perceive and admire the yearly replenishment which preserved
its vigor notwithstanding the superficially irreparable losses of each
year. There were moments when he regretted 202 High with what now seemed
its amazingly irresponsible existence, but 202 High had never given him
quite the same zest in returning to it as now 99 St. Giles could give.
Nothing had ever quite equaled those damp November dusks, when after a
long walk through silent country Michael and Alan came back to the din
of Carfax and splashed their way along the crowded and greasy Cornmarket
toward St. Giles, those damp November dusks when they would find the
tea-things glimmering in the firelight. Buttered toast was eaten; tea
was drunk; the second-best pipe of the day was smoked to idle cracklings
of The Oxford Review and The Star; a stout landlady cleared away, and
during the temporary disturbance Michael pulled back the blinds and
watched the darkness and fog slowly blotting out St. John's and the
alley of elm-trees opposite, and giving to the Martyrs' Memorial and
even to Balliol a gothic and significant mystery. The room was quiet
again; the lamps and the fire glowed; Michael and Alan, settled in deep
chairs, read their History and Philosophy; outside in the November night
footsteps went by; carts and wagons occasionally rattled; bells chimed;
outside in the November murk present life was manifesting