“Of course it is, what else have I to think about; what else concerns middle-aged people like you and me but our children?  Of course I want to talk to you about John.  Something must be done, things cannot go on as they are.  Why, it is nearly two years since he has been home.  Oh, that boy is breaking my heart, and none suspects it.  If you knew how it annoys me when the Gardiners and the Prestons congratulate me on having a son so well behaved.  They know he looks after his property sharp enough, no drinking, no bad company, no debts.  Ah! they little know....  I would much sooner he were wild and foolish:  young men get over those kind of faults, but he will never get over his.”

Mr Hare felt these views to be of a doubtful orthodoxy, but he did not press his opinion, and contented himself with murmuring gently that for the moment he did not see that John’s faults were of a particularly aggravated character.

“You do not see that his faults should cause me any uneasiness!  Perhaps it is very lucky he is not here, or you might encourage him in them.  I suppose you think he is doing quite right in spending his life at Stanton College, aping a priest and talking about Gothic arches.  Is it a proper thing to transact all his business through a solicitor, and never to see his tenants?  Why does he not come and live at his own beautiful place?  Why does he not take up his position in the county?  He is not a magistrate.  Why does he not get married?... he is the last; there is no one to follow him.  But he never thinks of that—­he is afraid that a woman might prove a disturbing influence in his life ... he feels that he must live in an atmosphere of higher emotions.  That’s the way he talks, and he is meditating, I assure you, a book on the literature of the Middle Ages, on the works of bishops and monks who wrote Latin in the early centuries.  His mind, he says, is full of the cadences of that language.  That’s the way he writes.  He never asks me about his property, never consults me in anything.  Here is a letter I received yesterday.  Listen: 

“’The poverty of spiritual life amid the western pagans could not fail to encourage the growth of new religious tendencies.  An epoch of great spiritual activity had been succeeded by one of complete stagnation.  A glance at the literary progress of Rome since Tiberius will show this emancipation from national and political considerations, the influence of cosmopolitanism gave to the best specimens of Latin prose of the silver age such riches and variety of substance and such individuality of expression, that Seneca and Tacitus and the letters of Pliny are marked with many modern characteristics.  Form and language appear in these writers only as the instrument and the matter wherewith men of genius would express their intimate personality.  Here antique culture rises above itself, but, mark you, at the expense of all that is proper to the Roman nation.  Cosmopolitan Hellenism forces and breaks down the bars of classical traditions, and, weary of restrictions these writers first sought personal satisfaction, and then addressed themselves to scholars rather than the people.