Sopwith went on talking; twining stiff fibres of awkward speech—­things young men blurted out—­plaiting them round his own smooth garland, making the bright side show, the vivid greens, the sharp thorns, manliness.  He loved it.  Indeed to Sopwith a man could say anything, until perhaps he’d grown old, or gone under, gone deep, when the silver disks would tinkle hollow, and the inscription read a little too simple, and the old stamp look too pure, and the impress always the same—­a Greek boy’s head.  But he would respect still.  A woman, divining the priest, would, involuntarily, despise.

Cowan, Erasmus Cowan, sipped his port alone, or with one rosy little man, whose memory held precisely the same span of time; sipped his port, and told his stories, and without book before him intoned Latin, Virgil and Catullus, as if language were wine upon his lips.  Only—­sometimes it will come over one—­what if the poet strode in?  “This my image?” he might ask, pointing to the chubby man, whose brain is, after all, Virgil’s representative among us, though the body gluttonize, and as for arms, bees, or even the plough, Cowan takes his trips abroad with a French novel in his pocket, a rug about his knees, and is thankful to be home again in his place, in his line, holding up in his snug little mirror the image of Virgil, all rayed round with good stories of the dons of Trinity and red beams of port.  But language is wine upon his lips.  Nowhere else would Virgil hear the like.  And though, as she goes sauntering along the Backs, old Miss Umphelby sings him melodiously enough, accurately too, she is always brought up by this question as she reaches Clare Bridge:  “But if I met him, what should I wear?”—­and then, taking her way up the avenue towards Newnham, she lets her fancy play upon other details of men’s meeting with women which have never got into print.  Her lectures, therefore, are not half so well attended as those of Cowan, and the thing she might have said in elucidation of the text for ever left out.  In short, face a teacher with the image of the taught and the mirror breaks.  But Cowan sipped his port, his exaltation over, no longer the representative of Virgil.  No, the builder, assessor, surveyor, rather; ruling lines between names, hanging lists above doors.  Such is the fabric through which the light must shine, if shine it can—­ the light of all these languages, Chinese and Russian, Persian and Arabic, of symbols and figures, of history, of things that are known and things that are about to be known.  So that if at night, far out at sea over the tumbling waves, one saw a haze on the waters, a city illuminated, a whiteness even in the sky, such as that now over the Hall of Trinity where they’re still dining, or washing up plates, that would be the light burning there—­the light of Cambridge.

“Let’s go round to Simeon’s room,” said Jacob, and they rolled up the map, having got the whole thing settled.