cholar, whom I
loved as Burke loved Shackleton. He died, God rest his soul, but the
good he left behind him lives after him: whatever grains of sense I have
shown, and whatever follies I have avoided, both what I am and what I am
not, are due to him, and it is to him that I owe the love of study which
has been the greatest consolation and the purest pleasure of my life.
That is why I pity so profoundly those poor Rochefort children, and the
tens of thousands like them, who are being educated by the commonplace,
flavorless, cramming system which people call education. It may be
education; it is not culture. What will the Babe always associate with
his Latin themes? Four walls, hated books, inky, aching fingers, and a
headache. Whereas I never look at a Latin line in a newspaper, be it one
ever so hackneyed, without pleasure, as at the face of an old friend,
and whenever I repeat to myself the words, I always smell the cowslips
and the lilac and the hawthorn of the spring mornings when I was a boy."

Xenia Sabaroff looked at him with some little wonder and more approval.

"My dear lord," she says seriously, "I think in your enthusiasm you
forget one thing, that there is ground on which good seed falls and
brings forth flowers and fruit, and there is other ground on which the
same seed, be it strewn every so thickly, lies always barren. Without
underrating the influences of your tutor, I must believe that had you
been educated at an English public school, or even in a French Lycee,
you would still have become a scholar, still have loved your books."

"Alas, madame," says Brandolin, with a little sigh, "perhaps I have only
been what Matthew Arnold calls a 'foiled circuitous wanderer' in the
orbit of life!"

"I imagine that you have not very often been foiled," replies the lady,
with a smile, "and wandering has a great deal to be said in its favor,
especially for a man. Women are happiest, perhaps, at anchor."

"Women used to be: not our women. _Nous avons change tout cela._ I have
bored you too much with myself and my opinions."

"No, you interest me," says his companion with a serious serenity which
deprives the words of all sound of flattery or encouragement. "I have
long admired your writings," she adds, and Brandolin colors a little
with gratification. The same kind of phrase is said to him on an average
five hundred times a year, and his usual emotion is either ennui or
irritation. The admiration of fools is folly