it's such a comfort to me now. It was you who put these sort
of thoughts into my head, too, so you ought to sympathize with
me."

"I do, my dear fellow. But you'll be all right again in a few
days."

"Don't you believe it. It isn't only what you seem to think,
Hardy. You don't know me so well as I do you, after all. No, I'm
not just love-sick, and hipped because I can't go and see her.
That has something to do with it, I dare say, but it's the sort
of shut-up selfish life we lead here that I can't stand. A man
isn't meant to live only with fellows like himself, with good
allowances paid quarterly, and no care but how to amuse
themselves. One is old enough for something better than that, I'm
sure."

"No doubt," said Hardy with provoking taciturnity.

"And the moment one tries to break through it, one only gets into
trouble."

"Yes, there's a good deal of danger of that, certainly," said
Hardy.

"Don't you often long to be in contact with some of the realities
of life, with men and women who haven't their bread and butter
already cut for them? How can a place be a university where no
one can come up who hasn't two hundred a year or so to live on?"

"You ought to have been at Oxford four hundred years ago, when
there were more thousands here than we have hundreds."

"I don't see that. It must have been ten times as bad then."

"Not at all. But it must have been a very different state of
things from ours; they must have been almost all poor scholars,
who worked for their living, or lived on next to nothing."

"How do you really suppose they lived, though?"

"Oh, I don't know. But how should you like it now, if we had
fifty poor scholars at St. Ambrose, besides us servitors--say ten
tailors, ten shoemakers, and so on, who came up from love of
learning, and attended all the lectures with us, and worked for
the present undergraduates while they were hunting, and
cricketing, and boating?"

"Well, I think it would be a very good thing--at any rate, we
should save in tailors' bills."

"Even if we didn't get our coats so well built," said Hardy,
laughing. "Well, Brown, you have a most catholic taste, and 'a
capacity for talking in new truths', all the elements of a good
Radical in you."

"I tell you, I hate Radicals," said Tom indignantly.

"Well, here we are in the town. I'll go round by 'The Choughs'
and catch you up before you get to High Street."

Tom, left, to himself, walked slowly on for a little wa