with a sense of extravagance, as if a
centaur pursued a nymph or fought with a hero. The soul--or what we call
the soul--is struggling in the bondage of your unformed body. Lately you
had no soul, you were ethereal and cold, yet withal in some remote way
passionate, like your own boy's voice. Now the silly sun is melting the
snow, and what was a little while since crystalline clear virginity is
beginning to trickle down towards a headlong course, carrying with it
the soiled accumulation of the years to float insignificantly into the
wide river of manhood. But I am really being almost intolerably
allegorical--or is it metaphorical?"

"Still, I think I understand what you mean," Michael said encouragingly.

"Thrown back upon your own resources, it is not surprizing that you
attempt to allay your own sense of your own incongruity by seeking for
its analogy in the decorative excitements of religion or poetry. Love
would supply the solution, but you are still too immature for love. And
if you do fall in love, you will sigh for some ample and unattainable
matron rather than the slim, shy girl that would better become your
pastoral graces. At present you lack all sense of proportion. You are
only aware of your awkwardness. Your corners have not yet been, as they
say, knocked off. You are still somewhat proud of their Gothic
angularity. You feel at home in the tropic dawns of Swinburne's poetry,
in the ceremonious exaggerations of Mass, because neither of these
conditions of thought and behaviour allow you to become depressed over
your oddity, to see yourself crawling with bedraggled wings from the
cocoon of mechanical education. The licentious ingenuity of Martial,
Petronius and Apuleius with their nightmare comedies and obscene
phantasmagoria, Lucian, that _boulevardier_ of Olympic glades, all these
could allow you to feel yourself more at home than does Virgil with his
peaceful hexameters or the cold relentless narrations of Thucydides."

"Yes, that's all very well," objected Michael. "But other chaps seem to
get on all right without being bored by ordinary things."

"Already spurning the gifts of Apollo, contemptuous of Artemis, ignorant
of Bacchus and Aphrodite, you are bent low before Pallas Athene. Foolish
child, do not pray for wisdom in this overwise thin-faced time of ours.
Rather demand of the gods folly, and drive ever furiously your
temperament like a chariot before you."

"I met an odd sort of chap the other