sband."

They had reached the corner of Hills Road. Ansell spoke for the first
time. He said, "Ugh!"

"Drains?"

"Yes. A spiritual cesspool."

Rickie laughed.

"I expected it from your letter."

"The one you never answered?"

"I answer none of your letters. You are quite hopeless by now. You can
go to the bad. But I refuse to accompany you. I refuse to believe that
every human being is a moving wonder of supreme interest and tragedy and
beauty--which was what the letter in question amounted to. You'll find
plenty who will believe it. It's a very popular view among people
who are too idle to think; it saves them the trouble of detecting the
beautiful from the ugly, the interesting from the dull, the tragic from
the melodramatic. You had just come from Sawston, and were apparently
carried away by the fact that Miss Pembroke had the usual amount of arms
and legs."

Rickie was silent. He had told his friend how he felt, but not what had
happened. Ansell could discuss love and death admirably, but somehow he
would not understand lovers or a dying man, and in the letter there had
been scant allusion to these concrete facts. Would Cambridge understand
them either? He watched some dons who were peeping into an excavation,
and throwing up their hands with humorous gestures of despair. These
men would lecture next week on Catiline's conspiracy, on Luther, on
Evolution, on Catullus. They dealt with so much and they had experienced
so little. Was it possible he would ever come to think Cambridge narrow?
In his short life Rickie had known two sudden deaths, and that is enough
to disarrange any placid outlook on the world. He knew once for all
that we are all of us bubbles on an extremely rough sea. Into this sea
humanity has built, as it were, some little breakwaters--scientific
knowledge, civilized restraint--so that the bubbles do not break so
frequently or so soon. But the sea has not altered, and it was only a
chance that he, Ansell, Tilliard, and Mrs. Aberdeen had not all been
killed in the tram.

They waited for the other tram by the Roman Catholic Church, whose
florid bulk was already receding into twilight. It is the first big
building that the incoming visitor sees. "Oh, here come the colleges!"
cries the Protestant parent, and then learns that it was built by a
Papist who made a fortune out of movable eyes for dolls. "Built out of
doll's eyes to contain idols"--that, at all events, is the legend and
the joke.