ed him as much as
me.

"I am sorry," I said to him, "but I really couldn't help it."

"There is no occasion to express or even to feel regret," he answered,
and his eyes twinkled delightfully; "if youth lost its spontaneity it
would at one and the same moment lose its charm. Did your cry refer to
this?" He pointed with his umbrella to a scrimmage which was taking
place a few yards away from us.

"Some one threw the ball forward, which he is not allowed to do," I
explained, and a man was hurled into touch close to the spot where we
were standing.

"The game of football which I believe bears the honoured name of Rugby
appeals, or it seems to me to appeal, to the more violent of the
emotions. Do you play this game, which strikes the eye of the
observant, but not initiated, as the relic of an age in which brute
force rather than science was the aim of the athlete?"

He walked on as he finished speaking, and I told him that I played
Rugby football and liked it. "I like nearly every game," I added.

He glanced at me quickly, and after we had walked a little way he began
again.

"The excellent Lord Chesterfield in his _Letters_ stated that it was
very disagreeable to seem reserved, and very dangerous not to be so;
most of my young friends impress me with the fact that they have
learned that maxim too well. But you on the contrary----" He waved his
umbrella and did not finish the sentence.

"There is no harm in liking games," I answered; "if I did not take
heaps of exercise I should never be well, or able to read."

"Heaps of exercise," he repeated, and looked oddly at me.

"I mean a fearful lot of exercise," I explained.

"You did not quote 'Mens sana in corpore sano,' for which I have to
thank you, even if your use of the English language affords reasonable
grounds for protest. Heaps of mud, heaps of rubbish, but not, I think,
heaps of exercise."

"Heaps of money," I ventured to suggest, but he shook his head sadly.

"We were talking of athletics," he said, "which represent to me the
most sweeping epidemic of the century. Do not let athletics spread
their deadly, if in one sense empurpling, pall over your University
life. Oxford has many gifts for those who are willing to receive them;
do not, my friend, be content with the least which she can give. The
maxim of Mr. Browning, that the grasp of a man should exceed his reach,
if not an ennobling maxim, must not be forgotten entirely."

I walked by his