the centuries, and
he had almost decided to devote himself to the service of Otto I and
Sylvester II, when in a moment the thought of Lily, sweeping as visibly
before his mind as the ghost in an Elizabethan play, made every kind of
research into the past seem a waste of resolution. He tore up the
congratulatory letters and decided to let the future wait a while. This
pursuit of Lily was a mad business, no doubt, but to come to grips with
the present called for a certain amount of madness.

Alan remonstrated with him, when he heard that he had no intention of
trying for All Souls.

"You are an extraordinary chap. You were always grumbling when you were
up that you didn't know what you ought to do, and now when it's
perfectly obvious you won't make the slightest attempt to do it."

"Used I to grumble?" asked Michael.

"Well, not exactly grumble. But you were always asking theoretical
questions which had no answer," said Alan severely.

"What if I told you I'd found an answer to a great many of them?"

"Ever since I've been engaged to Stella you've found it necessary to be
very mysterious. What are you playing at, Michael?"

"It's imaginable, don't you think, that I might be making up my mind to
do something which I considered more vital for me than a fellowship at
All Souls?"

"But it seems so obvious after your easy first that you should clinch
it."

"I tell you it was a fluke."

"My third wasn't a fluke," said Alan. "I worked really hard for it."

"Thirds and firsts are equally unimportant in the long run," Michael
argued. "You have already fitted into your place with the most complete
exactitude. There's no dimension in your future that can possibly
trouble you. Supposing I get this fellowship? It will either be too big
for me, in which case I shall have to be perpetually puffing out my
frills and furbelows to make a pretense of filling it, or it will be too
small, and I shall have to pare down my very soul in order to squeeze
into it most uncomfortably."

"You'll never do anything," Alan prophesied. "Because you'll always be
doubting."

"I might get rid finally of that sense of insecurity," Michael pointed
out. "With all doubts and hesitations I'm perfectly convinced of one
great factor in human life--the necessity to follow the impulse which
lies deeper than any reason. Reason is the enemy of civilization. Reason
carried to the _nth_ power can always with absurd ease be debauched
by sentiment, and s