careful not to grow up into a strong silent Englishman, because
their day was done. She practically told me I was rather an ass, and
pretended to be fearfully surprized when she heard I was going to try
for a scholarship at Oxford. She was squashing slugs all the time she
was talking, and I could do nothing but look a bigger fool than ever and
count the slugs. I ventured to remark once that most people thought it
was a good thing to be keen on games, and she said half the world was
composed of fools which accounted for the preponderation--I mean
preponderance--of pink on the map. She said it always looked like an
advertizement of successful fox-hunting. And when I carefully pointed
out that I'd never all my life had a chance to hunt, she said 'More's
the pity,' I couldn't make out what she was driving at; so, feeling
rather a worm, I shot off as soon as I could. What did she say to you?"

"Oh, nothing much," said Michael triumphantly. "She's a rum old girl,
but rather decent."

"She's too clever for me," said Alan, shaking his head. "It's like
batting to a pro."

Then from the complexities of feminine judgment, the conversation glided
easily like the canoe towards a discussion of the umpire's decision last
term in giving Alan out l.b.w. to a ball that pitched at least two feet
away from the off stump.

"It was rotten," said Alan fervidly.

"It was putrid," Michael agreed.

To avoid the difficulty of a first night in a strange cottage, Mrs. Fane
and Michael had supper at Cobble Place; and after a jolly evening spent
in looking for pencils to play games that nobody could ever recollect in
all their rich perfection of potential incidents, Michael and Mrs. Fane
walked with leisurely paces back to Woodbine Cottage through a
sweet-savoured moonless night.

Michael enjoyed the intimate good night beneath so small a roof, and
wished that Stella were with them. He lay awake, reading from each in
turn of the tower of books he had erected by his bedside to fortify
himself against sleeplessness. It was a queer enough mixture--Swinburne,
Keats, Matthew Arnold, Robinson Crusoe, Half-hours with the Mystics, Tom
Brown's Schooldays, Daudet's Sappho, the second volume of The Savoy, The
Green Carnation, Holy Living and Dying; and as each time he changed his
mind and took another volume, on the gabled ceiling the monstrous shadow
that was himself filled him with a dreadful uncertainty. After an hour
or so, he went to sit by the lo