He was not particularly eager to hear Marten’s answer.  He had thought, only a few days ago, that he would like to be a geologist; Marten had inspired him with a fancy for that science.  The fit was already passing.

How quickly this geological mood had evaporated.  How quickly everything evaporated, nowadays.

All was not well with Denis.  Early that morning he had tried his hand at poetry once more, after a long interval.  Four words—­that was all the inspiration which had come to him.

“Or vine-wreathed Tuscany. . . .”

A pretty turn, in the earlier manner of Keats.  It looked well on the snowy paper.  “Or vine-wreathed Tuscany.”  He was content with that phrase, so far as it went.  But where was the rest of the stanza?

How easily, a year or two ago, could he have fashioned the whole verse.  How easily everything was accomplished in those days.  To be a poet:  that was a fixed point on his horizon.  Any number of joyous lyrics, as well as three plays not intended for the stage, had already dropped from his pen.  He was an extraordinary success among his college friends; everybody liked him; he could say and do what he pleased.  Was he not the idol of a select group who admired not only one another but also the satanism of Baudelaire, the hieratic obscenities of Beardsley, the mustiest Persian sage, the modernest American ballad-monger?  He was full of gay irresponsibility.  Ever since, on returning to his rooms after some tedious lecture, he announced to his friends that he had lost an umbrella but preserved, thank God, his honour, they augured a brilliant future for him.  So, for other but no less cogent reasons, did his doting, misguided mother.

Both were disappointed.  Those sprightly sallies became rarer; epigrams died, still-born, on his lips.  He lost his sense of humour; grew mirthless, fretful, self-conscious.  He suddenly realized the existence of a world beyond his college walls; it made him feel like a hot-house flower exposed to the blustering winds of March.  Life was no longer a hurdle in a steeple-chase to be taken at a gallop; it was a tangle of beastly facts that stared you in the face and refused to get out of the way.  With growing years, during vacation, he came in contact with a new set of people; men who smiled indulgently at mention of all he held most sacred—­art, classics, literature; men who were plainly not insane and yet took up incomprehensible professions of one kind or another—­took them up with open eyes and unfeigned zest, and actually prospered at them in a crude worldly fashion.

He shrank at first from their society, consoling himself with the reflection that, being bounders, it did not matter whether they succeeded or not.  But this explanation did not hold good for long.  They were not bounders—­not all of them.  People not only dined with them:  they asked them to dinner.  Quite decent fellows, in fact.  Nothing was wrong with them, save that they held a point of view which was at variance with his own.