come down
to Gisson's afterwards, and as a memento of our year together in Study
1, just let me give you Swinburne's _Poems and Ballads_. It's great
stuff; you'll like it, and you'll find there something a bit better than
your caps and pots."

Gordon did not answer. The sun had now risen high above the Abbey.
Across the silence was wafted the cracked notes of the School House
bell; there was a rush of feet from the studies. For a few minutes
Gordon lay back in his chair quite quiet. A new day had broken on his
life. The future opened out with wide promises, with possibilities of
great things. For he had heard at last the call which, if ever a man
hears it, he casts away the nets and follows after--the call of
beauty--"which is, after all, only truth, seen from another side."

BOOK III: UNRAVELLING THE THREADS

"... and drank delight of battle with my peers."

TENNYSON.

"Yet would you tread again
All the road over?
Face the old joy and pain--
Hemlock and clover?
Yes. For it still was good,
Good to be living,
Buoyant of heart and blood;
Fighting, forgiving."

AUSTIN DOBSON.

"Oh! the hardest day was never then too hard."

LINDSAY GORDON.

CHAPTER I: COMMON ROOM FACES

Miracles do not happen, nor do sudden conversions. Man very rarely
changes. What he is at the beginning, he is at the end; all that occurs
is that at various stages of his journey he looks at life from a
different point of view, or rather through a different pair of
spectacles, for never on this earth do we really see things as they are.
When Gordon found new influences at work upon him, when he discovered
through literature that there is something higher than the ignoble
monotony of the average individual routine, he did not suddenly change
his whole way of life, and, "like a swimmer into cleanness leaping," put
out of sight behind him the things that had pleased him once. Right and
wrong are merely relative terms. What was considered right in the days
of Caesar spells social ostracism to-day. And there are a few who prefer
to see life as the Romans saw it, and to follow the ideals of power and
physical beauty. For such life is not easy. Yet we are not so much
better than "when Caesar Augustus was Egypt's Lord!" The question of what
is really right and what is really wrong will never be satisfactorily
decided, on this earth at any rate, for we cannot all wear the sam