o that you could hear him six forms
off. True, the new Head had been goaded by other outrages, the authors
of which had not omitted to remove their names; but the want of humor,
the amazing want of humor! As if it had not been a sign of first-rate
stuff in Tod! And to this day Felix remembered with delight the little
bubbling hiss that he himself had started, squelched at once, but
rippling out again along the rows like tiny scattered lines of fire when
a conflagration is suppressed. Expulsion had been the salvation of Tod!
Or--his damnation? Which? God would know, but Felix was not certain.
Having himself been fifteen years acquiring 'Mill' philosophy, and
another fifteen years getting rid of it, he had now begun to think that
after all there might be something in it. A philosophy that took
everything, including itself, at face value, and questioned nothing, was
sedative to nerves too highly strung by the continual examination of the
insides of oneself and others, with a view to their alteration. Tod, of
course, having been sent to Germany after his expulsion, as one naturally
would be, and then put to farming, had never properly acquired 'Mill'
manner, and never sloughed it off; and yet he was as sedative a man as
you could meet.

Emerging from the Tube station at Hampstead, he moved toward home under a
sky stranger than one might see in a whole year of evenings. Between the
pine-trees on the ridge it was opaque and colored like pinkish stone, and
all around violent purple with flames of the young green, and white
spring blossom lit against it. Spring had been dull and unimaginative so
far, but this evening it was all fire and gathered torrents; Felix
wondered at the waiting passion of that sky.

He reached home just as those torrents began to fall.

The old house, beyond the Spaniard's Road, save for mice and a faint
underlying savor of wood-rot in two rooms, well satisfied the aesthetic
sense. Felix often stood in his hall, study, bedroom, and other
apartments, admiring the rich and simple glow of them--admiring the
rarity and look of studied negligence about the stuffs, the flowers, the
books, the furniture, the china; and then quite suddenly the feeling
would sweep over him: "By George, do I really own all this, when my ideal
is 'bread and water, and on feast days a little bit of cheese'?" True,
he was not to blame for the niceness of his things--Flora did it; but
still--there they were, a little hard