stay.  I wonder if anyone was ever in love like that!  I daresay it’s common enough.  But I won’t go into that; these raptures are for private consumption.  I was roughly jerked up.  I took a bad degree.  My mother died—­I had very little in common with her:  she was an invalid without any hold on life, and I took no trouble to be kind to her—­I was perfectly selfish and wilful.  Then I had to earn my living.  I would have given anything to stay at Oxford:  and you know, even now, when I think of Oxford, a sort of electric shock goes through me, I love it so much.  I daren’t even set foot there, I’m so afraid of finding it altered.  But when I think of those dark courts and bowery gardens, and the men moving about, and the fronts of blistered stone, and the little quaint streets, and the meadows and elms, and the country all about, I have a physical yearning that is almost a pain—­a sort of home-sickness—­”

He broke off, and was silent for a moment, and I saw that his eyes were full of tears.

“Then it was London, that accursed place!  I had a tiny income:  I got a job at a coaching establishment, I worked like the devil.  That was a cruel time.  I couldn’t dream of marriage—­that all vanished, and she married pretty soon, I couldn’t get a holiday—­I was too poor.  I tried writing, but I made a hash of that.  I simply went down into hell.  One of my great friends died, and the other—­well, it was awkward to meet, when I had had to break it off with his sister.  I simply can’t describe to you how utterly horrible it all was.  I used to teach all the terms, and in the vacations I simply mooned about.  I hadn’t a club, and I used to read at the Museum—­read just to keep my senses.  Then, I suppose I got used to it.  Of course, if I had had any adventurousness in me, I should have gone off and become a day-labourer or anything—­but I am not that sort of person.

“That went on till I was about thirty-three—­and then quite suddenly, and without any warning, I had my experience.  I suppose that something was going on inside me all the time, something being burnt out of me in those fires.  It was a mixture of selfishness and stupidity and perverseness that was the matter with me.  I didn’t see that I could do anything.  I was simply furious with the world for being such a hole, and with God for sticking me in the middle of it.  The occasion of the change was simply too ridiculous.  It was nothing else but coming back to my rooms and finding a big bowl of daffodils there.  They had been left, my landlady told me, by a young gentleman.  It sounds foolish enough—­but it suddenly occurred to me to think that someone was interested in me, pitied me, cared for me.  A sort of mist cleared away from my eyes, and I saw in a flash, what was the mischief—­that I had walled myself in by my misery and bad temper, and by my expectation that something must be done for me.  The next day I had to take a lot of pupils, one after another, for composition.  One of them had a daffodil