."

"But, Michael," interrupted Mrs. Ross, "I don't fancy the greatest
geniuses in the world ever justified themselves at sixteen or
seventeen."

"No, but they must have been upheld by the inner consciousness of
greatness. You get that tremendously through all the despondencies of
Keats' letters for instance. I have never had that. Stella absorbed all
the creative and interpretative force that was going. I never have and
never shall get beyond sympathy, and even the value that gives my
criticism is to a certain extent destroyed by the fact that the moment I
try to express myself more permanently than by mouth, I am done."

"But still, I don't see why a day-school should have militated against
the development of that sympathetic and critical faculty."

"It did in this way," said Michael. "It gave me too much with which to
sympathize before I could attune my sympathy to criticism. In fact I was
unbalanced. Eton would have adjusted this balance. I'm sure of that,
because since I've been at Oxford I find my powers of criticism so very
much saner, so very much more easily economized. I mean to say, there's
no wastage in futile emotions. Of course, it's partly due to being
older."

"Really, Michael," Mrs. Ross protested, "if you talk like this I shall
begin to regret your earlier extravagance. This dried-up self-confidence
seems to me not quite normal either."

"Ah, that's only because I'm criticizing my earlier self. I really am
now in a delightful state of cool judgment. Once I used to want
passionately to be like everybody else. I thought that was the goal of
social happiness. Then I wanted to be violently and conspicuously
different from everybody else. Now I seem to be getting near the right
mean between the two extremes. I'm enjoying Oxford enormously. I can't
tell you how happy I am here, how many people I like. And I appreciate
it so much the more because to a certain extent at first it was a
struggle to find that wide normal road on which I'm strolling along now.
I'm so positive that the best of Oxford is the best of England, and that
the best of England is the best of humanity that I long to apply to the
world the same standards we tacitly respect--we undergraduates. I
believe every problem of life can be solved by the transcendency of the
spirit which has transcended us up here. You remember I used to say you
were like Pallas Athene? Well, just those qualities in you which made me
think of that resemblance I