ill be engaged
to be married at twenty-three. He has no knowledge of the world; for
example, he thinks that if you do not want money you can give it to
friends who do. He believes in humanity because he knows a dozen decent
people. He believes in women because he has loved his mother. And his
friends are as young and as ignorant as himself. They are full of the
wine of life. But they have not tasted the cup--let us call it the
teacup--of experience, which has made men of Mr. Pembroke's type what
they are. Oh, that teacup! To be taken at prayers, at friendship, at
love, till we are quite sane, efficient, quite experienced, and quite
useless to God or man. We must drink it, or we shall die. But we need
not drink it always. Here is our problem and our salvation. There comes
a moment--God knows when--at which we can say, "I will experience no
longer. I will create. I will be an experience." But to do this we must
be both acute and heroic. For it is not easy, after accepting six cups
of tea, to throw the seventh in the face of the hostess. And to Rickie
this moment has not, as yet, been offered.

Ansell, at the end of his third year, got a first in the Moral Science
Tripos. Being a scholar, he kept his rooms in college, and at once
began to work for a Fellowship. Rickie got a creditable second in the
Classical Tripos, Part I., and retired to sallow lodgings in Mill bane,
carrying with him the degree of B.A. and a small exhibition, which was
quite as much as he deserved. For Part II. he read Greek Archaeology,
and got a second. All this means that Ansell was much cleverer than
Rickie. As for the cow, she was still going strong, though turning a
little academic as the years passed over her.

"We are bound to get narrow," sighed Rickie. He and his friend were
lying in a meadow during their last summer term. In his incurable love
for flowers he had plaited two garlands of buttercups and cow-parsley,
and Ansell's lean Jewish face was framed in one of them. "Cambridge is
wonderful, but--but it's so tiny. You have no idea--at least, I think
you have no idea--how the great world looks down on it."

"I read the letters in the papers."

"It's a bad look-out."

"How?"

"Cambridge has lost touch with the times."

"Was she ever intended to touch them?"

"She satisfies," said Rickie mysteriously, "neither the professions, nor
the public schools, nor the great thinking mass of men and women. There
is a general feeling that her da