Atque meo David dulces cantate camoenas. 
    David amat vates, vatorum est gloria David. 
    Dulcis amor David inspirat corda canentum,
    Cordibus in nostris faciat amor ipsius odas: 
    Vates Homerus amat David, fac, fistula, versus. 
    David amat vates, vatorum est gloria David.’”

“I should have flogged that monk—­’ipsius,’ oh, oh!—­’vatorum.’...  It really is too terrible.”

John laughed, and was about to reply, when the clanging of the college bell was heard.

“I am afraid that is dinner-time.”

“Afraid, I am delighted; you don’t suppose that every one can live, chameleon-like, on air, or worse still, on false quantities.  Ha, ha, ha!  And those pictures too.  That snow is more violet than white.”

When dinner was over, John and Mr Hare walked out on the terrace.  The carriage waited in the wet in front of the great oak portal; the grey, stormy evening descended on the high roofs, smearing the red out of the walls and buttresses, and melancholy and tall the red college seemed amid its dwarf plantation, now filled with night wind and drifting leaves.  Shadow and mist had floated out of the shallows above the crests of the valley, and the lamps of the farm-houses gleamed into a pale existence.

“And now tell me what I am to say to your mother.  Will you come home for Christmas?”

“I suppose I must.  I suppose it would seem so unkind if I didn’t.  I cannot account even to myself for my dislike to the place.  I cannot think of it without a revulsion of feeling that is strangely personal.”

“I won’t argue that point with you, but I think you ought to come home.”

“Why?  Why ought I to come to Sussex, and marry my neighbour’s daughter?”

“There is no reason that you should marry your neighbour’s daughter, but I take it that you do not propose to pass your life here.”

“For the present I am concerned mainly with the problem of how I may make advances, how I may meet life, as it were, half-way; for if possible I would not quite lose touch of the world.  I would love to live in its shadow, a spectator whose duty it is to watch and encourage, and pity the hurrying throng on the stage.  The church would approve this attitude, whereas hate and loathing of humanity are not to be justified.  But I can do nothing to hurry the state of feeling I desire, except of course to pray.  I have passed through some terrible moments of despair and gloom, but these are now wearing themselves away, and I am feeling more at rest.”

Then, as if from a sudden fear of ridicule, John said, laughing:  “Besides, looking at the question from a purely practical side, it must be hardly wise for me to return to society for the present.  I like neither fox-hunting, marriage, Robert Louis Stevenson’s stories, nor Sir Frederick Leighton’s pictures; I prefer monkish Latin to Virgil, and I adore Degas, Monet, Manet, and Renoir, and since this is so, and alas, I am afraid irrevocably so, do you not think that I should do well to keep outside a world in which I should be the only wrong and vicious being?  Why spoil that charming thing called society by my unlovely presence?