want a long bath of
silence and recollection and repose. I want to fill my cistern again
with my own thoughts and my own dreams, instead of pumping up the muddy
waters of irrigation. I don't think my colleagues are like that. I sate
with half-a-dozen of them last night at supper. They were full of all
they meant to do. Two of the most energetic were going off to play
golf, and the chief pleasure of the place they were going to was that
it was possible to get a round on Sundays; they were going to fill the
evening with bridge, and one of them said with heart-felt satisfaction,
"I am only going to take two books away with me--one on golf and the
other on bridge--and I am going to cure some of my radical faults." I
thought to myself that if he had forborne to mention the subjects of
his books, one might have supposed that they would be a Thomas-a-Kempis
and a Taylor's Holy Living, and then how well it would have seemed! Two
more were going for a rapid tour abroad in a steamer chartered for
assistant masters. That seemed to me to be almost more depressing. They
were going to ancient historical places, full of grave and beautiful
associations; places to go to, it seemed to me, with some single
like-minded associate, places to approach with leisurely and untroubled
mind, with no feeling of a programme or a time-table--and least of all
in the company of busy professional people with an academical cicerone.

Still, I suppose that this is true devotion to one's profession. They
will be able, they think, to discourse easily and, God help us,
picturesquely about what they have seen, to intersperse a Thucydides
lesson with local colour, and to describe the site of the temple of
Delphi to boys beginning the Eumenides. It is very right and proper, no
doubt, but it produces in me a species of mental nausea to think of the
conditions under which these impressions will be absorbed. The
arrangements for luncheon, the brisk interchange of shop, the cheery
comments of fellow-tradesmen, the horrible publicity and banality of
the whole affair!

My two other colleagues were going, one to spend a holiday at
Brighton--which he said was very bracing at Easter, adding that he
expected to fall in with some fellows he knew. They will all stroll on
the Parade, smoke cigarettes together, and adjourn for a game of
billiards. No doubt a very harmless way of passing the time, but not to
me enlivening. But Walters is a conventional person, and, as long