he
influence of Neech must have depended on a personality that demanded
from his pupils a stoic bearing, a sense of humour, a capacity for
inquisitiveness, an idea of continuity. He could not remember that any
of these qualities had been appreciated by himself until he had entered
the Shell. Michael regretted very deeply that on the day before he left
school he had not thanked Neech for his existence. How nebulous already
most of his other masters seemed. Only Neech stood out clear-cut as the
intagliation of a sardonyx.

Meditation upon Neech took Michael off to Thackeray. He had been reading
Pendennis lately, and the book had given him much the same sensation of
finality as his old form-master, and as Michael thought of Thackeray, he
began to speculate upon the difference between Michael Fane and the
fourteenth Earl of Saxby. Yet he was rather glad that after all he was
not the fourteenth Earl of Saxby. It would be interesting to see how his
theories of good-breeding were carried out by himself as a nobody with
old blood in his veins. He would like to test the common talk that rank
was an accident, that old families, old faiths, old education, old
customs, old manners, old thoughts, old books were all so much
moonshine. Michael wondered whether it were so; whether indeed all men
if born with equal chances would not display equal qualities. He did not
believe it: he hated the doctrine. Yet people in all their variety
called to him still, and as he surveyed the audience he was aware from
time to time of a great longing to involve himself in the web of
humanity. He was glad that he had not removed himself from the world
like Chator. Chator! He must go down to Clere and see how Chator was
getting on as a monk. He had not even thought of Chator for a year. But
after all Oxford had a monastic intention, and Michael believed that
from Oxford he would gain as much austerity of attitude as Chator would
acquire from the rule of St. Benedict. And when he left Oxford, he would
explore humanity. He would travel through the world and through the
underworld and apply always his standard of ... of what? What was his
standard? A classic permanence, a classic simplicity and inevitableness?

The symphony stopped. He must hurry out and congratulate Stella. What a
possession she was; what an excitement her career would be. How he would
love to control her extravagance, and even as he controlled it, how he
would admire it. And his mother h