But I shudder to think how sick I am of it all!  I want a long bath of silence and recollection and repose.  I want to fill my cistern again with my own thoughts and my own dreams, instead of pumping up the muddy waters of irrigation.  I don’t think my colleagues are like that.  I sate with half-a-dozen of them last night at supper.  They were full of all they meant to do.  Two of the most energetic were going off to play golf, and the chief pleasure of the place they were going to was that it was possible to get a round on Sundays; they were going to fill the evening with bridge, and one of them said with heart-felt satisfaction, “I am only going to take two books away with me—­one on golf and the other on bridge—­and I am going to cure some of my radical faults.”  I thought to myself that if he had forborne to mention the subjects of his books, one might have supposed that they would be a Thomas-a-Kempis and a Taylor’s Holy Living, and then how well it would have seemed!  Two more were going for a rapid tour abroad in a steamer chartered for assistant masters.  That seemed to me to be almost more depressing.  They were going to ancient historical places, full of grave and beautiful associations; places to go to, it seemed to me, with some single like-minded associate, places to approach with leisurely and untroubled mind, with no feeling of a programme or a time-table—­ and least of all in the company of busy professional people with an academical cicerone.

Still, I suppose that this is true devotion to one’s profession.  They will be able, they think, to discourse easily and, God help us, picturesquely about what they have seen, to intersperse a Thucydides lesson with local colour, and to describe the site of the temple of Delphi to boys beginning the Eumenides.  It is very right and proper, no doubt, but it produces in me a species of mental nausea to think of the conditions under which these impressions will be absorbed.  The arrangements for luncheon, the brisk interchange of shop, the cheery comments of fellow-tradesmen, the horrible publicity and banality of the whole affair!

My two other colleagues were going, one to spend a holiday at Brighton—­which he said was very bracing at Easter, adding that he expected to fall in with some fellows he knew.  They will all stroll on the Parade, smoke cigarettes together, and adjourn for a game of billiards.  No doubt a very harmless way of passing the time, but not to me enlivening.  But Walters is a conventional person, and, as long as he is doing what he would call “the correct thing,” he is perfectly and serenely content.  The sixth and last is going to Surbiton to spend the holidays with a mother and three sisters, and I think he is the most virtuously employed of all.  He will walk out alone, with a terrier dog, before lunch; and after lunch he will go out with his sisters; and perhaps the vicar will come to tea.  But then it will be home, and the girls will be proud of their brother, and will have the dishes he likes, and he will have his father’s old study to smoke in.  I am not sure that he is not the happiest of all, because he is not only pursuing his own happiness.