e and good spirits as ever, and if
possible even handsomer than he had been at Cambridge. Much as Ernest
liked him he found himself shrinking from speaking to him, and was
endeavouring to pass him without doing so when Towneley saw him and
stopped him at once, being pleased to see an old Cambridge face. He
seemed for the moment a little confused at being seen in such a
neighbourhood, but recovered himself so soon that Ernest hardly noticed
it, and then plunged into a few kindly remarks about old times. Ernest
felt that he quailed as he saw Towneley's eye wander to his white necktie
and saw that he was being reckoned up, and rather disapprovingly reckoned
up, as a parson. It was the merest passing shade upon Towneley's face,
but Ernest had felt it.

Towneley said a few words of common form to Ernest about his profession
as being what he thought would be most likely to interest him, and
Ernest, still confused and shy, gave him for lack of something better to
say his little threepenny-bit about poor people being so very nice.
Towneley took this for what it was worth and nodded assent, whereon
Ernest imprudently went further and said "Don't you like poor people very
much yourself?"

Towneley gave his face a comical but good-natured screw, and said
quietly, but slowly and decidedly, "No, no, no," and escaped.

It was all over with Ernest from that moment. As usual he did not know
it, but he had entered none the less upon another reaction. Towneley had
just taken Ernest's threepenny-bit into his hands, looked at it and
returned it to him as a bad one. Why did he see in a moment that it was
a bad one now, though he had been unable to see it when he had taken it
from Pryer? Of course some poor people were very nice, and always would
be so, but as though scales had fallen suddenly from his eyes he saw that
no one was nicer for being poor, and that between the upper and lower
classes there was a gulf which amounted practically to an impassable
barrier.

That evening he reflected a good deal. If Towneley was right, and Ernest
felt that the "No" had applied not to the remark about poor people only,
but to the whole scheme and scope of his own recently adopted ideas, he
and Pryer must surely be on a wrong track. Towneley had not argued with
him; he had said one word only, and that one of the shortest in the
language, but Ernest was in a fit state for inoculation, and the minute
particle of virus set about working immed