e law about black
clothes. So that year many people went back to the earlier mode of the
university examination and appeared in evening-dress. The first four
days went by with their monotony of scratching pens, their perspiring
and bedraggled women-candidates, their tedious energy and denial of
tobacco. Alan grew gloomier and gloomier. He scarcely thought he had
even escaped being plowed outright. For the fourth night preparatory to
the two papers on his Special Subject, Michael ordered iced asparagus
and quails in aspic, a bottle of champagne and two quarts of cold black
coffee. He sat up all night, and went down tight-eyed and pale-faced to
the final encounter. In the afternoon he emerged, thanked heaven it was
all over, and, instead of celebrating his release as he had intended
with wine and song, slept in an armchair through the benign June
evening. Alan, who had gone to bed at his usual hour the night before,
spent his time reading the credentials of various careers offered to
enterprising young men by the Colonies. The day after, however, nothing
seemed to matter except that the purgatorial business was done forever,
and that Oxford offered nearly a fortnight of impregnable idleness.

This fortnight, when she was so prodigal with her beauty and when her
graciousness was a rich balm to the ordeal she had lately exacted, was
not so poignant as Michael had expected. Indeed, it was scarcely
poignant at all so far as human farewells went, though there was about
it such an underlying sadness as deepens the mellow peace of a fine
autumn day.

It seemed to Michael that in after years he would always think of Oxford
dowered so with Summer, and brooding among her trees. Matthew Arnold had
said she did not need June for beauty's heightening. That was true. Her
beauty was not heightened now, but it was displayed with all the grave
consciousness of an unassertive renown. Michael dreaded more the loss of
this infoliated calm than of any of the people who were enjoying its
amenity. There were indeed groups upon the lawns that next year would
not form themselves, that forever indeed would be irremediably
dispersed; but the thought of himself and other members scattered did
not move him with as much regret as the knowledge that next year himself
would have lost the assurance that he was an organic part of this
tutelary landscape. The society of his contemporaries was already broken
up: the end of the third year had effected that.