But her presence at breakfast—­that invasion of the morning hours—­was irritating; he hated the request to be in to lunch, and the duty of spending the evening in her drawing-room, instead of in club or bar-room.  He desired freedom to spend each minute as the caprice of the moment prompted.  Were he a rich man he would not have lived with Frank; to live with a man was unpleasant; to live with a woman was intolerable.  In the morning he must be alone to dream of a book or poem; in the afternoons, about four, he was glad to aestheticize with Harding or Thompson, or abandon himself to the charm of John’s aspirations.

John and he were often seen walking together, and they delighted in the Temple.  The Temple is escapement from the omniscient domesticity which is so natural to England; and both were impressionable to its morning animation—­the young men hurrying through the courts and cloisters, the picturesqueness of a wig and gown passing up a flight of steps.  It seemed that the old hall, the buttresses and towers, the queer tunnels leading from court to court, turned the edge of the commonplace of life.  Nor did the Temple ever lose for them its quaint and primitive air, and as they strolled about the cloisters talking of art or literature, they experienced a delight that cannot be quite put into words; and were strangely glad as they opened the iron gates, and looked on all the many brick entanglements with the tall trees rising, spreading the delicate youth of leaves upon the weary red of the tiles and the dim tones of the dear walls.

  “A gentel Manciple there was of the Temple
   Of whom achatours mighten take ensample
   For to ben wise in bying of vitaille.”

The gentle shade of linden trees, the drip of the fountain, the monumented corner where Goldsmith rests, awake even in the most casual and prosaic a fleeting touch of romance.  And the wide steps with balustrades sweeping down in many turnings to the gardens, cause vagrant and hurrying steps to pause, and wander about the library and through the gardens, which lead with such charm of way to the open spaces of the King’s Bench walk.

There, there is another dining-hall and another library.  The clock is ringing out the hour, and the place is filled with young men in office clothes, hurrying on various business with papers in their hands; and such young male life is one of the charms of the Temple; and the absence of women is refreshment to the eye wearied of their numbers in the streets.  The Temple is an island in the London sea.  Immediately you pass the great doorway, studded with great nails, you pass out of the garishness of the merely modern day, unhallowed by any associations, into a calmer and benigner day, over which floats some shadow of the great past.  The old staircases lighted by strange lanterns, the river of lingering current, bearing in its winding so much of London into one enchanted view.  The church built by the Templars more than seven hundred years ago, now stands in the centre of the inn all surrounded, on one side yellowing smoke-dried cloisters, on another side various closes, feebly striving in their architecture not to seem too shamefully out of keeping with its beauty.  There it stands in all the beauty of its pointed arches and triple lancet windows, as when it was consecrated by the Patriarch of Jerusalem in the year 1185.