dea of duty, and "imagine," he
would say, "how the right sort of woman would despise a dutiful husband;"
and he would tell us how much my mother would scorn such a thing. Maybe
there were people among whom such ideas were natural, but they were the
people with whom one does not dine. All he said was, I now believe right,
but he should have taken me away from school. He would have taught me
nothing but Greek and Latin, and I would now be a properly educated man,
and would not have to look in useless longing at books that have been,
through the poor mechanism of translation, the builders of my soul, nor
faced authority with the timidity born of excuse and evasion. Evasion and
excuse were in the event as wise as the house-building instinct of the
beaver.

XII

My London schoolfellow, the athlete, spent a summer with us, but the
friendship of boyhood, founded upon action and adventure, was drawing to
an end. He was still my superior in all physical activity and climbed to
places among the rocks that even now are uncomfortable memories, but I had
begun to criticize him. One morning I proposed a journey to Lambay Island,
and was contemptuous because he said we should miss our mid-day meal. We
hoisted a sail on our small boat and ran quickly over the nine miles and
saw on the shore a tame sea-gull, while a couple of boys, the sons of a
coastguard, ran into the water in their clothes to pull us to land, as we
had read of savage people doing. We spent an hour upon the sunny shore and
I said, "I would like to live here always, and perhaps some day I will." I
was always discovering places where I would like to spend my whole life.
We started to row home, and when dinner-time had passed for about an hour,
the athlete lay down on the bottom of the boat doubled up with the gripes.
I mocked at him and at his fellow-countrymen whose stomachs struck the
hour as if they were clocks.

Our natural history, too, began to pull us apart. I planned some day to
write a book about the changes through a twelve-month among the creatures
of some hole in the rock, and had some theory of my own, which I cannot
remember, as to the colour of sea-anemones: and after much hesitation,
trouble and bewilderment, was hot for argument in refutation of Adam and
Noah and the Seven Days. I had read Darwin and Wallace, Huxley and
Haeckel, and would spend hours on a holiday plaguing a pious geologist,
who, when not at some job in Guinness's brewery, came with