ks?" Michael asked.

"Oh, binges," said Lonsdale. "We ought to be able to run some pretty
useful binges here. Besides, I'm thinking of learning the bagpipes."

Wedderburn had moved into the Tudor richness of the large gateway room
in St. Cuthbert's tower. Avery had succeeded the canorous
Templeton-Collins on Michael's staircase, and had brought back with him
from Flanders an alleged Rubens to which the rest of the furniture and
the honest opinions of his friends were ruthlessly sacrified. Michael
alone had preferred to remain in the rooms originally awarded to him. He
had a sentimental objection to denying them the full period of their
participation in his own advance along the lines he had marked out for
himself. As he entered them now to resume the tenure interrupted by the
Long Vacation he compared their present state with the negative effect
they had produced a year ago. Being anxious to arrange some decorative
purchases he had made in France, Michael had ordered commons for himself
alone. How intimate and personal that sparse lunch laid for one on a
large table now seemed! How trimly crowded was now that inset bookcase
and what imprisoned hours it could release to serve his pleasure! There
was not now indeed a single book that did not recall the charmed
idleness of the afternoon it commemorated. Nor was there one volume that
could not conjure for him at midnight with enchantments eagerly expected
all the day long.

It was a varied library this that in three terms he had managed to
gather together. When he began, ornate sets like great gaudy heralds had
proclaimed those later arrivals which were after all so much the more
worshipful. The editions of luxury had been succeeded by the
miscellanies of mere information, works that fired the loiterer to
acquire them for the sake of the knowledge of human by-ways they
generally so jejunely proffered. And yet perhaps it was less for their
material contents that they were purchased than for the fact that in
some dead publishing season more extravagant buyers had spent four or
five times as much to partake of their accumulated facts and fortuitous
illustrations. With Michael the passion for remainders was short-lived,
and he soon pushed them ignobly out of the way for the sake of those
stately rarities that combined a decorous exterior with the finest
flavor of words and a permanent value that was yet subject to mercantile
elation and depression.

If among these ambassado