If any light burns above Cambridge, it must be from three such rooms; Greek burns here; science there; philosophy on the ground floor.  Poor old Huxtable can’t walk straight;—­Sopwith, too, has praised the sky any night these twenty years; and Cowan still chuckles at the same stories.  It is not simple, or pure, or wholly splendid, the lamp of learning, since if you see them there under its light (whether Rossetti’s on the wall, or Van Gogh reproduced, whether there are lilacs in the bowl or rusty pipes), how priestly they look!  How like a suburb where you go to see a view and eat a special cake!  “We are the sole purveyors of this cake.”  Back you go to London; for the treat is over.

Old Professor Huxtable, performing with the method of a clock his change of dress, let himself down into his chair; filled his pipe; chose his paper; crossed his feet; and extracted his glasses.  The whole flesh of his face then fell into folds as if props were removed.  Yet strip a whole seat of an underground railway carriage of its heads and old Huxtable’s head will hold them all.  Now, as his eye goes down the print, what a procession tramps through the corridors of his brain, orderly, quick-stepping, and reinforced, as the march goes on, by fresh runnels, till the whole hall, dome, whatever one calls it, is populous with ideas.  Such a muster takes place in no other brain.  Yet sometimes there he’ll sit for hours together, gripping the arm of the chair, like a man holding fast because stranded, and then, just because his corn twinges, or it may be the gout, what execrations, and, dear me, to hear him talk of money, taking out his leather purse and grudging even the smallest silver coin, secretive and suspicious as an old peasant woman with all her lies.  Strange paralysis and constriction—­marvellous illumination.  Serene over it all rides the great full brow, and sometimes asleep or in the quiet spaces of the night you might fancy that on a pillow of stone he lay triumphant.

Sopwith, meanwhile, advancing with a curious trip from the fire-place, cut the chocolate cake into segments.  Until midnight or later there would be undergraduates in his room, sometimes as many as twelve, sometimes three or four; but nobody got up when they went or when they came; Sopwith went on talking.  Talking, talking, talking—­as if everything could be talked—­the soul itself slipped through the lips in thin silver disks which dissolve in young men’s minds like silver, like moonlight.  Oh, far away they’d remember it, and deep in dulness gaze back on it, and come to refresh themselves again.

“Well, I never.  That’s old Chucky.  My dear boy, how’s the world treating you?” And in came poor little Chucky, the unsuccessful provincial, Stenhouse his real name, but of course Sopwith brought back by using the other everything, everything, “all I could never be”—­yes, though next day, buying his newspaper and catching the early train, it all seemed to him childish, absurd; the chocolate cake, the young men; Sopwith summing things up; no, not all; he would send his son there.  He would save every penny to send his son there.