This pleased and touched me very deeply.  I began to murmur something.  “Oh no,” said Father Payne, “you needn’t!  A boy at a prize-giving isn’t required to enter into easy talk with the presiding buffer!  I have just handed you your prize.”

He talked after this lightly of many small things—­about Barthrop in particular, and asked me many questions about him.  “I am afraid I haven’t allowed him enough initiative,” said Father Payne; “that’s a bad habit of mine.  But if he had really had it, we should have squabbled—­he’s not quite fiery enough, the beloved Barthrop!  He’s awfully judicious, but he must have a lead.  He’s a submissioner, I’m afraid, as a witty prelate once said!  You know the two sides of the choir, Decani and Cantoris as they are called. Decani always begin the psalms and say the versicles, Cantoris always respond.  People are always one or the other, and Barthrop is a born Cantoris.”

We did not go very far, and he soon proposed to return.  But just as we were nearing home, he said, “I think the hardest thing in life to understand—­the very hardest of all—­is our pleasure in the sense of permanence!  It’s the supreme and constant illusion.  I can’t think where it comes from, or why it is there, or what it is supposed to do for us.  Do you remember,” he said with a smile, “how Shelley, the most hopelessly restless of mortals, whenever he settled anywhere, always wrote to his friends that he had established himself for ever?  It’s the instinct which is most contrary to reason.  Everything contradicts it—­we are not the same people for five minutes together, nothing that we see or hear or taste continues—­and yet we feel eternally and immutably fixed; and instead of living each day as if it was our last—­which is a thoroughly bad piece of advice—­we live each day as if it was one of an endlessly revolving chain of days, and as if we were going to live to all eternity—­as indeed I believe we are!  Probably the reason for it is to give us a hint that we are immortal, after all, though we are tempted to think that all things come to an end.  It is strange to think that nothing on which our eyes rest at this moment is the same as it was when we started our walk—­the very stones of the wall are altered.  It ought to make us ashamed of pretending that we are anything but ourselves; and yet we do change a little, thank God, and for the better.  I’ve a fancy—­though I can’t say more than that of that we aren’t meant to know anything:  and I think that the times when we know, or think we know, are the times when we stand still.  That seems hard!”—­he broke off with an unusual emotion:  but he was himself again in a moment, and said, “I don’t know why—­it’s the weather, perhaps:  but I feel inclined to do nothing but thank people all day, like the man in Happy Thoughts you know, who came down late for breakfast and could say nothing but ’Thanks, thanks, awfully thanks—­thanks (to the butler), thanks (to the hostess)—­thanks, thanks!’ but it means something—­a real emotion, though grotesquely phrased!—­I’ve enjoyed this bit of a walk, my boy!”