“Smith looked up with relief from the glittering pools below to the glittering skies and the great black bulk of the college.  The only light other than stars glowed through one peacock-green curtain in the upper part of the building, marking where Dr. Emerson Eames always worked till morning and received his friends and favourite pupils at any hour of the night.  Indeed, it was to his rooms that the melancholy Smith was bound.  Smith had been at Dr. Eames’s lecture for the first half of the morning, and at pistol practice and fencing in a saloon for the second half.  He had been sculling madly for the first half of the afternoon and thinking idly (and still more madly) for the second half.  He had gone to a supper where he was uproarious, and on to a debating club where he was perfectly insufferable, and the melancholy Smith was melancholy still.  Then, as he was going home to his diggings he remembered the eccentricity of his friend and master, the Warden of Brakespeare, and resolved desperately to turn in to that gentleman’s private house.

“Emerson Eames was an eccentric in many ways, but his throne in philosophy and metaphysics was of international eminence; the university could hardly have afforded to lose him, and, moreover, a don has only to continue any of his bad habits long enough to make them a part of the British Constitution.  The bad habits of Emerson Eames were to sit up all night and to be a student of Schopenhauer.  Personally, he was a lean, lounging sort of man, with a blond pointed beard, not so very much older than his pupil Smith in the matter of mere years, but older by centuries in the two essential respects of having a European reputation and a bald head.

“`I came, against the rules, at this unearthly hour,’ said Smith, who was nothing to the eye except a very big man trying to make himself small, `because I am coming to the conclusion that existence is really too rotten.  I know all the arguments of the thinkers that think otherwise—­bishops, and agnostics, and those sort of people.  And knowing you were the greatest living authority on the pessimist thinkers—­’

“`All thinkers,’ said Eames, `are pessimist thinkers.’

“After a patch of pause, not the first—­for this depressing conversation had gone on for some hours with alternations of cynicism and silence—­ the Warden continued with his air of weary brilliancy:  `It’s all a question of wrong calculation.  The moth flies into the candle because he doesn’t happen to know that the game is not worth the candle.  The wasp gets into the jam in hearty and hopeful efforts to get the jam into him.  In the same way the vulgar people want to enjoy life just as they want to enjoy gin—­because they are too stupid to see that they are paying too big a price for it.  That they never find happiness—­that they don’t even know how to look for it—­is proved by the paralyzing clumsiness and ugliness of everything they do.  Their discordant colours are cries of pain.  Look at the brick villas beyond the college on this side of the river.  There’s one with spotted blinds; look at it! just go and look at it!’