ou know?"

"I don't take very much interest in his movements," Alan loftily
explained.

They smoked on for a while without speaking.

"I must go to bed," announced Alan at last.

"Not yet, not yet," Michael urged him. "I don't think you've quite
realized that this is our last night in Ninety-nine."

"I've settled to stay on here during Commem Week," said Alan. "Your
people are staying at the Randolph?"

Michael nodded, wondering to himself if it were possible that Alan could
really have been so far-sighted as to stay on in St. Giles for the sake
of having the most obvious right to escort his mother and Stella home.
"But why aren't you going into college?" he asked.

"Oh, I thought it would be rather a fag moving in for so short a time.
Besides, it's been rather ripping in these digs."

Michael looked at him gratefully. He had himself feared to voice his
appreciation of this last year with Alan: he was feeling sentimental
enough to dread on Alan's side a grudging assent to his enthusiasm.

"Yes, it has been awfully ripping," he agreed.

"I should like to have had another year," sighed Alan. "I think I was
just beginning to get a dim sort of a notion of philosophy. I wonder how
much of it is really applicable?"

"To what? To God?" asked Michael.

"No, the world--the world we live in."

"I don't fancy, you know," said Michael, "that the intellectual part of
Oxford is directly applicable to the world at all. What I mean to say
is, that I think it can only be applied to the world through our
behavior."

"Well, of course," said Alan, "that's a truism."

Michael was rather disconcerted. The thought in his mind had seemed more
worthy of expression.

"But the point is," Alan went on, "whether our philosophic education,
our mental training has any effect on our behavior. It seems to me that
Oxford is just as typically Oxford whatever a man reads."

"That wasn't the case at school," said Michael. "I'm positive for
instance the Modern side was definitely inferior to the Classical
side--in manners and everything else. And though at Oxford other
circumstances interfere to make the contrast less violent, it doesn't
seem to me one gains the quintessence of the university unless one reads
Greats. Even History only supplies that in the case of men
exceptionally sensitive to the spirit of place. I mean to say sensitive
in such a way that Oxford, quite apart from dons and undergraduates, can
herself educate. I'm treme