ul! The dim Gothic glooms,
the sombre hues of stained glass, the incense-wreathed acolytes, the
muttering priests, the bedizened banners and altars and images. Ah,
elusive and particoloured vision that once was mine!"

"Then I got keen on Swinburne," said Michael.

"You advance along the well-worn path of the Interior and Elect," said
Mr. Wilmot.

"I'm still keen on Swinburne, but he makes me feel hopeless. Sad and
hopeless," said Michael.

"Under the weight of sin?" asked Mr. Wilmot.

"Not exactly--because he seems to have done everything and----"

"You'd like to?"

"Yes, I would," said Michael. "Only one can't live like a Roman Emperor
at a public school. What I hate is the way everybody thinks you ought to
be interested in things that aren't really interesting at all. What
people can't understand about me is that I _could_ be keener than
anybody about things schoolmasters and that kind don't think right or
at any rate important. I don't mean to say I want to be dissipated,
but----"

"Dissipated?" echoed Mr. Wilmot, raising his eyebrows.

"Well, you know what I mean," blushed Michael.

"Dissipation is a condition of extreme old age. I might be dissipated,
not you," said Mr. Wilmot. "Why not say wanton? How much more beautiful,
how much more intense a word."

"But wanton sounds so beastly affected," said Michael. "As if it was
taken out of the Bible. And you aren't so very old. Not more than
thirty."

"I think what you're trying to say is that, under your present mode of
life, you find self-expression impossible. Let me diagnose your
symptoms."

Michael leaned forward eagerly at this proposal. Nothing was so
entertaining to his egoism just now as diagnosis. Moreover, Mr. Wilmot
seemed inclined to take him more seriously than Mr. Viner, or, indeed,
any of his spiritual directors so far. Mr. Wilmot prepared himself for
the lecture by lighting a very long cigarette wrapped in brittle
fawn-coloured paper, whose spirals of smoke Michael followed upward to
their ultimate evanescence, as if indeed they typified with their
tenuous plumes and convolutions the intricate discourse that begot them.

"In a sense, my dear boy, your charm has waned--the faerie charm, that
is, which wraps in heedless silver armour the perfect boyhood of man.
You are at present a queer sort of mythical animal whom we for want of a
better term call 'adolescent.' Intercourse with anything but your own
self shocks both you and the world