ROMANTIC EDUCATION

Sancta ad vos anima atque istius inscia culpae
descendam, magnorum haud umquam indignus avorum.

VIRGIL.

For Fancy cannot live on real food:
In youth she will despise familiar joy
To dwell in mournful shades, as they grow real,
Then buildeth she of joy her fair ideal.

ROBERT BRIDGES.

CHAPTER I

OSTIA DITIS

When Michael reached the Oxford Music-hall he wondered why he had
overspurred his fatigue to such a point. There was no possibility of
pleasure here, and he would have done better to stay at home and cure
with sleep what was after all a natural depression. It had been foolish
to expect a sedative from contact with this unquiet assemblage. In the
mass they had nothing but a mechanical existence, subject as they were
to the brightness or dimness of the electrolier that regulated their
attention. Michael did not bother to buy a program. From every podgy
hand he could see dangling the lithograph of St. Mary's tower with its
glazed moonlight; and he was not sufficiently aware of the glib atom who
bounced about the golden dazzle of the stage to trouble about his name.
He mingled with the slow pace of the men and women on the promenade.
They were going backward and forward like flies, meeting for a moment in
a quick buzz of colloquy and continuing after a momentary pause their
impersonal and recurrent progress. Michael was absorbed in this
ceaseless ebb and flow of motion where the sidelong glances of the
women, as they brushed his elbow in the passing crowd, gave him no
conviction of an individual gaze. Once or twice he diverted his steps
from the stream and tried to watch in a half-hearted way the
performance; but as he leaned over the plush-covered barrier a woman
would sidle up to him, and he would move away in angry embarrassment
from the questioning eyes under the big plumed hat. The noise of popping
corks and the chink of glasses, the whirr of the ventilating fans, the
stentorophonic orchestra, the red-faced raucous atom on the stage
combined to irritate him beyond further endurance; and he had just
resolved to walk seven times up and down the promenade before he went
home, when somebody cried in heartiest greeting over his shoulder,
"Hullo, Bangs!"

Michael turned and saw Drake, and so miserable had been the effect of
the music-hall that he welcomed him almost effusively, although he had
not seen him during four years and would probably li