Peter was at home for a day before returning to Oxford. Hamingburgh seemed to have grown very small and quiet. He felt in coming back a loss of energy. In London he had seemed at the heart of a hundred questions. He had watched the London crowds with intimacy. They were very real. He lost this reality in the quiet streets of Hamingburgh. Life ceased to ask urgently for an explanation.

He noted on his way from the station that people were moving into Miranda\'s empty house. But it hardly seemed to matter.

Peter enjoyed one happy evening with his mother, and left for Oxford.

But Oxford had disappeared. Where was the beautiful city—offering illimitable knowledge, sure wisdom, lovely authority? Peter had come into touch with life. He had craved to find order and beauty in the pageant of London. Now, in the stones of Oxford, he saw only the frozen ideas of a vanished age—serene accomplishment whose finality exasperated him. He looked from his window across the shaven green of a perfect lawn to the chapel tower. The hour chiming in quarters from a dozen bells marked off yet another small distance between Oxford and the living day.[Pg 97] His disillusion of the previous term was now openly confessed and examined.

Peter was not alone. Gamaliel drew to itself some excellent brain. It was celebrated for young men prematurely wise—young men who had learned everything at twenty-two, and never afterwards added to their store. Peter became a leading character in the intellectual set. They jested in good Greek, filling their heads with knowledge they affected to despise, taking in vain the theories of their masters, merrily playing with their grand-sires\' bones of learning. They snorted with delight at the efforts of their chief clerical instructor to evade the Rabelaisian Obscenities of Aristophanes or a too curious inquiry into certain social habits of old Greece. They reduced Hegel to half-sheets of paper, suggested profanely various readings for Petronius, speculated without reverence on the darker habits of mankind from Aristotle to the Junior Prior. But in all this horseplay of minds young and keen was a strain of contemptuous fatigue. Gamaliel, out of its clever youngsters, bred civil servants, politicians, or university professors. Intellectual pedantry waited for those whom Gamaliel intellectually satisfied. Intellectual cynicism—the cynicism of a firm belief that nothing is important or new—waited for those who played the game of scholarship with humour enough to find it barren.

Peter, therefore, was not alone in his reaction against the formal discipline of the College, but he[Pg 98] was alone in the obstinate ardour of his youth. He had just discovered that life was absorbing. Though he sat far into many nights in scholarly gymnastics with his friends, he came away to watch the grey light creeping into a world he keenly wanted to understand. He jested only with his brain, driven to the game by physical energy and friendly emulation. He was never really touched by the cynicism and horse laughter of his set. He often left these meetings in a sudden access of desolation.

Peter\'s directors began sadly to shake their heads. They knew the symptoms—knew he was already marked for failure. The Warden gravely reasoned with him.

"Mr. Paragon," he said, handing Peter his papers for the term, "these are second class."

Peter was mortified. His intellectual comrades mocked, but they also satisfied, their masters. Peter was of another fibre. He could do nothing without his entire heart. Various readings in Horace no longer fired him. The kick had gone out of his work. His brain was elsewhere.

He took the papers in silence. He could not understand his failure. Hitherto satisfying the examiners had been for Peter a matter of course.

"You have neglected your reading?" the Warden suggested, as Peter turned silently away.

"No, sir."

"Won\'t you take us a little more seriously?"

[Pg 99]

"I cannot be interested," Peter shot out impulsively.

"Is this wise?" the Warden gravely inquired. "We expect you to do well."

"I will try, sir."

Peter was sad, but not sullen.

"You owe it to the College," said the Warden, drily incisive. Then he added: "Why must you go so quickly, Mr. Paragon? You are not yet ready for things outside."

Peter was suddenly grateful. He was, at any rate, understood.

"I will try with my whole soul," he ardently exclaimed.

"Meanwhile," the Warden concluded with a smile, "notes on gobbets need not be written in the manner of La Rochefoucauld. There isn\'t time."

Peter, passing into the quadrangle, met Dundoon. He was in riding breeches. He lived in riding breeches, till they became for Peter a symbol of well-born inanity. Moreover, he was freely indulging his principal pleasure—namely, he was vigorously cracking a riding-whip, making the walls ring with snap after snap.

"Hullo," he said as Peter passed within careful distance.

"Idiot," muttered Peter between his teeth.

"Freshly roasted by the Wuggins—What?"

"Dundoon, you\'re a damned nuisance. Put it away."

[Pg 100]

"It\'s most important, Peter Pagger. It\'s most devilish important. M.F.H.—What?"

Dundoon cracked his whip rather more successfully than usual. The snap tingled in Peter\'s brain. In a fit of temper he sprang at Dundoon, and wrenched the whip from his hand.

Dundoon looked at Peter\'s gleaming eyes as though he had seen the devil.

"What\'s this? In the name of Hell what is it?" he said at last.

"I\'m sorry," said Peter with withering humility. "Here is your whip."

He handed it back to Dundoon, who took it cautiously. Peter moved away. But Dundoon arrested him.

"Peter Pagger," he said thoughtfully, "do I understand that you\'ve been rude to me?"

"As you please."

"Because you\'ll be ragged, that\'s all. You\'ll be jolly well ragged."

The party of Dundoon was strolling up, and was invited to hear the news.

"Here, you fellows. Peter Pagger has been very rude to me. What shall we do to him? Peter Pagger has been roasted by the Wuggins for his naughty life in London. Third stocking from the right—What?"

Peter strode off boiling with anger.

Dundoon belonged to a set which derived principally from a famous English school. It was a set traditionally opposed to the intellectuals;[Pg 101] indeed these two principal sets fed fat an ancient grudge. College humour mainly consisted at this time in the invention of scandalous histories by members of one set concerning members of the other. Needless to say the Paggers far excelled the Dundoons in the pith of their libels, so that the Dundoons had often to assert their supremacy in other ways. Upon one cold winter night, for example, the Paggers, one and all, retiring to rest had missed a necessary vessel. Thick snow covered the garden quadrangle, of which the Dundoons had built an immense mound upon the lawn. After three days a thaw set vigorously in, and the Junior Prior, looking from his window in the dawn, was shocked by an unutterable stack of College china mocking the doubtful virginity of the snow. The enterprises............