ou, Michael, shall read to me some diabolic and funereal
song of Baudelaire, so that I may fearfully pass away."

Michael, sitting in the dim room of peacock-blue made tremendously
nocturnal by the heavy smoke of all the cigarettes, did not much care
for the turn the conversation of Mr. Wilmot had taken. It had been
interesting enough, while the discussion applied directly to himself;
but all this vague effusion of learning meant very little to him. At the
same time, there was an undeniable eccentricity in a member of the Upper
Fifth sitting thus in fantastic communion with a figure completely
outside the imagination of Mr. Cray or any of his inky groundlings.
Michael began to feel a contemptuous pity for his fellows now buried in
bedclothes, hot and heavy with Ciceronian sentences and pious
preparation. He began to believe that if he wished to keep pace with
this new friendship, he must acquire something of Mr. Wilmot's
heightened air. And however mad he might seem, there stood the books,
and there stood the cigarettes for Michael's pleasure. It was all very
exciting, and it would not have been possible to say that before he met
Wilmot.

The friendship progressed through the rest of the autumn-term, and
Michael drifted farther away from the normal life of the school than
even his incursion into Catholicism had taken him. That phase of his
development had penetrated deeper than any other, and from time to time
Michael knew bitter repentances and made grim resolutions. From time to
time letters would arrive from Dom Cuthbert asking him down to Clere
Abbey; Mr. Viner, too, would question him narrowly about his new set of
friends, and Michael's replies never seemed perfectly satisfactory to
the shrewd priest.

It was by his costume more than by anything else that Michael expressed
at first his sense of emancipation. He took to coming to school in vivid
bow-ties that raised Mr. Cray's most sarcastic comments.

"The sooner you go to the History Sixth, Fane, and take that loathsome
ribbon with you, the better for us all. Where did you get it? Out of the
housemaid's trunk, one would say, by its appearance."

"It happens to be a tie," said Michael with insolence in his tone.

"Oh, it happens to be a tie, does it? Well, it also happens to be an
excellent rule of St. James' School that all boys, however clever, wear
dark suits and black ties. There also happens to be an excellent cure
for pretentious and flamboyant youths w