the other; but it is German, which makes up for any trifling
inconvenience. Baireuth, too; perhaps it will strike you as a dull and
stinking little town, and so I dare say it is. But after lunch we shall
go up the hillside to where the theatre stands, at the edge of the
pine-woods, and from the porch the trumpets will give out the motif of
the Grail, and we shall pass out of the heat into the cool darkness of
the theatre. Aren't you thrilled, Comber? Doesn't a holy awe pervade
you! Are you worthy, do you think?"

All this youthful, unrestrained enthusiasm was a revelation to Michael.
Intentionally absurd as Falbe's rhapsody on the Fatherland had been,
Michael knew that it sprang from a solid sincerity which was not ashamed
of expressing itself. Living, as he had always done, in the rather
formal and reticent atmosphere of his class and environment, he would
have thought this fervour of patriotism in an English mouth ridiculous,
or, if persevered in, merely bad form. Yet when Falbe hailed the Rhine
and the spires of Cologne, it was clear that there was no bad form about
it at all. He felt like that; and, indeed, as Michael was beginning to
perceive, he felt with a similar intensity on all subjects about which
he felt at all. There was something of the same vivid quality about Aunt
Barbara, but Aunt Barbara's vividness was chiefly devoted to the hunt
of the absurdities of her friends, and it was always the concretely
ridiculous that she pursued. But this handsome, vital young man, with
his eagerness and his welcome for the world, who had fallen with
so delightful a cordiality into Michael's company, had already an
attraction for him of a sort he had never felt before.

Dimly, as the days went by, he began to conjecture that he who had never
had a friend was being hailed and halloed to, was being ordered, if
not by precept, at any rate by example, to come out of the shell of his
reserve, and let himself feel and let himself express. He could see how
utterly different was Falbe's general conception and practice of
life from his own; to Michael it had always been a congregation of
strangers--Francis excepted--who moved about, busy with each other and
with affairs that had no allure for him, and were, though not uncivil,
wholly alien to him. He was willing to grant that this alienation, this
absence of comradeship which he had missed all his life, was of his own
making, in so far as his shyness and sensitiveness were the caus