If you are, the fault is in yourself, not in me!’ I shuffled my feet about on the stone pavement, not knowing what to say—­then I stammered out the foolish excuses young men make when they find themselves in an awkward corner.  He listened to my stammering remarks about ‘the other fellows’ with attentive patience,—­then he took his hand from my shoulder with a quick, decisive movement.  ’Look here, Harland’—­he said—­’You are taking up all the conventions and traditions with which our poor old Alma Mater is encrusted, and sticking them over you like burrs.  They’ll cling, remember!  It’s a pity you choose this way of going,—­I’m starting at the farther end—­where Oxford leaves off and Life begins!’ I suppose I stared—­for he went on—­’I mean Life that goes forward,—­not Life that goes backward, picking up the stale crumbs fallen from centuries that have finished their banquet and passed on.  There!—­I won’t detain you!  We shall not meet often—­but don’t forget what I have said,—­that if you are afraid of me, or of any other man, or of any existing thing,—­the fault is in yourself, not in the persons or objects you fear.’  ‘I don’t see it,’ I blurted out, angrily—­’What of the other fellows?  They think you’re queer!’ He laughed.  ‘Bless the other fellows!’ he said—­’They’re with you in the same boat!  They think me queer because they are queer—­that is,- -out of line—­themselves.’  I was irritated by his easy indifference and asked him what he meant by ‘out of line.’  ’Suppose you see a beautiful garden harmoniously planned,’ he said, still smiling, ’and some clumsy fellow comes along and puts a crooked pigstye up among the flower beds, you would call that “out of line,” wouldn’t you?  Unsuitable, to say the least of it?’ ‘Oh!’ I said, hotly—­’So you consider me and my friends crooked pigstyes in your landscape?’ He made me a gay, half apologetic gesture.  ’Something of the type, dear boy!’ he said—­’But don’t worry!  The crooked pigstye is always a most popular kind of building in the world you will live in!’ With that he bade me good-night, and went.  I was very angry with him, for I was a conceited youth and thought myself and my particular associates the very cream of Oxford,—­but he took all the highest honours that year, and when he finally left the University he vanished, so to speak, in a blaze of intellectual glory.  I have never seen him again—­and never heard of him—­and so I suppose his studies led him nowhere.  He must be an elderly man now,—­he may be lame, blind, lunatic, or what is more probable still, he may be dead, and I don’t know why I think of him except that his theories were much the same as those of our little friend,”—­again indicating me by a nod—­“He never cared for agreeable speeches,—­always rather mistrusted social conventions, and believed in a Higher Life after Death.”

“Or a Lower,”—­I put in, quietly.

“Ah yes!  There must be a Down grade, of course, if there is an Up.  The two would be part of each other’s existence.  But as I accept neither, the point does not matter.”