Philip was a good listener; though he often thought of clever things to say, it was seldom till after the opportunity to say them had passed; but Hayward was communicative; anyone more experienced than Philip might have thought he liked to hear himself talk.  His supercilious attitude impressed Philip.  He could not help admiring, and yet being awed by, a man who faintly despised so many things which Philip had looked upon as almost sacred.  He cast down the fetish of exercise, damning with the contemptuous word pot-hunters all those who devoted themselves to its various forms; and Philip did not realise that he was merely putting up in its stead the other fetish of culture.

They wandered up to the castle, and sat on the terrace that overlooked the town.  It nestled in the valley along the pleasant Neckar with a comfortable friendliness.  The smoke from the chimneys hung over it, a pale blue haze; and the tall roofs, the spires of the churches, gave it a pleasantly medieval air.  There was a homeliness in it which warmed the heart.  Hayward talked of Richard Feverel and Madame Bovary, of Verlaine, Dante, and Matthew Arnold.  In those days Fitzgerald’s translation of Omar Khayyam was known only to the elect, and Hayward repeated it to Philip.  He was very fond of reciting poetry, his own and that of others, which he did in a monotonous sing-song.  By the time they reached home Philip’s distrust of Hayward was changed to enthusiastic admiration.

They made a practice of walking together every afternoon, and Philip learned presently something of Hayward’s circumstances.  He was the son of a country judge, on whose death some time before he had inherited three hundred a year.  His record at Charterhouse was so brilliant that when he went to Cambridge the Master of Trinity Hall went out of his way to express his satisfaction that he was going to that college.  He prepared himself for a distinguished career.  He moved in the most intellectual circles:  he read Browning with enthusiasm and turned up his well-shaped nose at Tennyson; he knew all the details of Shelley’s treatment of Harriet; he dabbled in the history of art (on the walls of his rooms were reproductions of pictures by G. F. Watts, Burne-Jones, and Botticelli); and he wrote not without distinction verses of a pessimistic character.  His friends told one another that he was a man of excellent gifts, and he listened to them willingly when they prophesied his future eminence.  In course of time he became an authority on art and literature.  He came under the influence of Newman’s Apologia; the picturesqueness of the Roman Catholic faith appealed to his esthetic sensibility; and it was only the fear of his father’s wrath (a plain, blunt man of narrow ideas, who read Macaulay) which prevented him from ‘going over.’  When he only got a pass degree his friends were astonished; but he shrugged his shoulders and delicately insinuated that he was not the dupe of examiners.  He made