ose which are
the subjective product of a diseased imagination, and which, to our
destruction, we invest with the semblance of reality? If this never
struck you, let it strike you now."

Rickie spoke again, but received no answer. He paced a little up and
down the sombre roam. Then he sat on the edge of the table and watched
his clever friend draw within the square a circle, and within the
circle a square, and inside that another circle, and inside that another
square.

"Why will you do that?"

No answer.

"Are they real?"

"The inside one is--the one in the middle of everything, that there's
never room enough to draw."

II

A little this side of Madingley, to the left of the road, there is a
secluded dell, paved with grass and planted with fir-trees. It could not
have been worth a visit twenty years ago, for then it was only a scar
of chalk, and it is not worth a visit at the present day, for the trees
have grown too thick and choked it. But when Rickie was up, it chanced
to be the brief season of its romance, a season as brief for a chalk-pit
as a man--its divine interval between the bareness of boyhood and the
stuffiness of age. Rickie had discovered it in his second term, when the
January snows had melted and left fiords and lagoons of clearest water
between the inequalities of the floor. The place looked as big as
Switzerland or Norway--as indeed for the moment it was--and he came upon
it at a time when his life too was beginning to expand. Accordingly the
dell became for him a kind of church--a church where indeed you could
do anything you liked, but where anything you did would be transfigured.
Like the ancient Greeks, he could even laugh at his holy place and
leave it no less holy. He chatted gaily about it, and about the pleasant
thoughts with which it inspired him; he took his friends there; he even
took people whom he did not like. "Procul este, profani!" exclaimed a
delighted aesthete on being introduced to it. But this was never to be
the attitude of Rickie. He did not love the vulgar herd, but he knew
that his own vulgarity would be greater if he forbade it ingress, and
that it was not by preciosity that he would attain to the intimate
spirit of the dell. Indeed, if he had agreed with the aesthete, he
would possibly not have introduced him. If the dell was to bear any
inscription, he would have liked it to be "This way to Heaven," painted
on a sign-post by the high-road, and he did not realiz