gh a tram rumbled slowly past. The clock struck ten
from St. Mary's tower. The wicker chair creaked comfortably. The watered
silk of the rich bindings swished luxuriously. This was how Boccaccio
should be read. Michael's mind was filled with the imagination of that
gay company, secluded from the fever, telling their gay stories in the
sunlight of their garden. This was how Rabelais should be read: the very
pages seemed to glitter like wine.

Midnight chimed from St. Mary's tower. One by one the new books went
gloriously to their gothic shelves. The red lamp was extinguished.
Michael's bedroom was scented with the breath of the October night. It
was too cold to read more than a few sentences of Pater about some
splendid bygone Florentine. Out snapped the electric light: the room was
full of moonshine, so full that the water in the bath tub was gleaming.

CHAPTER II

THE FIRST WEEK

The first two or three days were busy with interviews, initiations,
addresses, and all the academic panoply which Oxford brings into action
against her neophytes.

First of all, the Senior Tutor, Mr. Ardle, had to be visited. He was a
deaf and hostile little man whose side-whiskers and twitching eyelid and
manner of exaggerated respect toward undergraduates combined to give the
impression that he regarded them as objectionable discords in an
otherwise justly modulated existence.

Michael in his turn went up the stairs to Mr. Ardle's room, knocked at
the door and passed in at the don's bidding to where he sat sighing amid
heaps of papers and statistical sheets. The glacial air of the room was
somehow increased by the photographs of Swiss mountains that crowded the
walls.

"Mr.?" queried the Senior Tutor. "Oh, yes, Mr. Fane. St. James'. Your
tutor will be the Dean--please sit down--the Dean, Mr. Ambrose. What
school are you proposing to read?"

"History, I imagine," said Michael. "History!" he repeated, as Mr. Ardle
blinked at him.

"Yes," said the Senior Tutor in accents of patient boredom. "But we have
to consider the immediate future. I suggest Honor Moderations and Literae
Humaniores."

"I explained to you that I wanted to read History," said Michael,
echoing himself involuntarily the don's tone of patient boredom.

"I have you down as coming from St. James'," snapped the Senior Tutor.
"A school reputed to send out good classical scholars, I believe."

"I'm not a scholar," Michael interrupted. "And I don't intend to ta