And then, doffing one’s own headpiece, how strange to assume for a moment some one’s—­any one’s—­to be a man of valour who has ruled the Empire; to refer while Brangaena sings to the fragments of Sophocles, or see in a flash, as the shepherd pipes his tune, bridges and aqueducts.  But no—­we must choose.  Never was there a harsher necessity! or one which entails greater pain, more certain disaster; for wherever I seat myself, I die in exile:  Whittaker in his lodging-house; Lady Charles at the Manor.

A young man with a Wellington nose, who had occupied a seven-and-sixpenny seat, made his way down the stone stairs when the opera ended, as if he were still set a little apart from his fellows by the influence of the music.

At midnight Jacob Flanders heard a rap on his door.

“By Jove!” he exclaimed.  “You’re the very man I want!” and without more ado they discovered the lines which he had been seeking all day; only they come not in Virgil, but in Lucretius.

“Yes; that should make him sit up,” said Bonamy, as Jacob stopped reading.  Jacob was excited.  It was the first time he had read his essay aloud.

“Damned swine!” he said, rather too extravagantly; but the praise had gone to his head.  Professor Bulteel, of Leeds, had issued an edition of Wycherley without stating that he had left out, disembowelled, or indicated only by asterisks, several indecent words and some indecent phrases.  An outrage, Jacob said; a breach of faith; sheer prudery; token of a lewd mind and a disgusting nature.  Aristophanes and Shakespeare were cited.  Modern life was repudiated.  Great play was made with the professional title, and Leeds as a seat of learning was laughed to scorn.  And the extraordinary thing was that these young men were perfectly right—­extraordinary, because, even as Jacob copied his pages, he knew that no one would ever print them; and sure enough back they came from the Fortnightly, the Contemporary, the Nineteenth Century—­ when Jacob threw them into the black wooden box where he kept his mother’s letters, his old flannel trousers, and a note or two with the Cornish postmark.  The lid shut upon the truth.

This black wooden box, upon which his name was still legible in white paint, stood between the long windows of the sitting-room.  The street ran beneath.  No doubt the bedroom was behind.  The furniture—­three wicker chairs and a gate-legged table—­came from Cambridge.  These houses (Mrs. Garfit’s daughter, Mrs. Whitehorn, was the landlady of this one) were built, say, a hundred and fifty years ago.  The rooms are shapely, the ceilings high; over the doorway a rose, or a ram’s skull, is carved in the wood.  The eighteenth century has its distinction.  Even the panels, painted in raspberry-coloured paint, have their distinction. ...