hen he was able to break the rhythm of
the battledores by knocking down whatever liturgical or theological
shuttlecock was being used. He would put forward the most outrageous
heresy as his own firm conviction, and scandalize and even alarm poor
Mr. Prout, who did not at all relish dogmatic follow-my-leader and
prayed for Michael's reckless soul almost as fervidly as for the
confusion of the timid and malignant who annually objected to the
forthcoming feast of the Assumption at St. Bartholomew's. Mr. Prout,
however, was only one of a series of ritualistic young men who prattled
continually of vestments and ceremonies and ornaments, until Michael
began to resent their gossip and withdraw from their society into the
woods, there to dream, staring up at the green and blue arch above him,
of the past here in wind-stirred solitude so much the more real.
Michael was a Catholic because Catholicism assured him of continuity and
shrouded him with a sensuous austerity, but in these hours of revolt he
found himself wishing for the old days with Alan. He was fond enough of
Chator, but to Chator everything was so easy, and when one day a letter
arrived to call him back to his family earlier than he expected, Michael
was glad. The waning summer was stimulating his imagination with warm
noons and gusty twilights; Chator's gossip broke the spell.

Michael went for solitary walks on the downs, where he loved to lie in
hollows and watch the grasses fantastically large against the sky, and
the bulky clouds with their slow bewitching motion. He never went to
visit sentimentally the spot where stone and harebell commemorated his
brief experience of faith's profundity, for he dreaded lest indifference
should rob him of a perfect conception. He knew very well even already
the dangerous chill familiarity of repetition. Those cloud-enchanted
days of late summer made him listlessly aware of fleeting impulses, and
simultaneously dignified with incommunicable richness the passivity and
even emptiness of his condition. On the wide spaces of the downs he
wandered luxuriously irresolute; his mind, when for a moment it goaded
itself into an effort of concentration, faltered immediately, so that
dead chivalries, gleaming down below in the rainy dusk of the valleys,
suffered in the very instant of perception a transmutation into lamplit
streets; and the wind's dull August booming made embattled drums and
fanfares romantic no more than music heard in Lond