erk, and was brought in contact with men and women as well
as with text-books. Philip saw Norah every day.

Lawson had been spending the summer at Poole, and had a number of sketches
to show of the harbour and of the beach. He had a couple of commissions
for portraits and proposed to stay in London till the bad light drove him
away. Hayward, in London too, intended to spend the winter abroad, but
remained week after week from sheer inability to make up his mind to go.
Hayward had run to fat during the last two or three years--it was five
years since Philip first met him in Heidelberg--and he was prematurely
bald. He was very sensitive about it and wore his hair long to conceal the
unsightly patch on the crown of his head. His only consolation was that
his brow was now very noble. His blue eyes had lost their colour; they had
a listless droop; and his mouth, losing the fulness of youth, was weak and
pale. He still talked vaguely of the things he was going to do in the
future, but with less conviction; and he was conscious that his friends no
longer believed in him: when he had drank two or three glasses of whiskey
he was inclined to be elegiac.

"I'm a failure," he murmured, "I'm unfit for the brutality of the struggle
of life. All I can do is to stand aside and let the vulgar throng hustle
by in their pursuit of the good things."

He gave you the impression that to fail was a more delicate, a more
exquisite thing, than to succeed. He insinuated that his aloofness was due
to distaste for all that was common and low. He talked beautifully of
Plato.

"I should have thought you'd got through with Plato by now," said Philip
impatiently.

"Would you?" he asked, raising his eyebrows.

He was not inclined to pursue the subject. He had discovered of late the
effective dignity of silence.

"I don't see the use of reading the same thing over and over again," said
Philip. "That's only a laborious form of idleness."

"But are you under the impression that you have so great a mind that you
can understand the most profound writer at a first reading?"

"I don't want to understand him, I'm not a critic. I'm not interested in
him for his sake but for mine."

"Why d'you read then?"

"Partly for pleasure, because it's a habit and I'm just as uncomfortable
if I don't read as if I don't smoke, and partly to know myself. When I
read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come
across a passage, perhaps only