"The study of dead languages is a 'cul-de-sac,'" he explained. "You can see the effect it has had in the very atmosphere of Oxford. You can see the effect it has had on Middleton, dear fellow, who got a double First, and the Ireland, and everything else proper and useless, and who is now--what? A conscientious schoolmaster, and nothing more!"
It was necessary to bring Middleton in because May Dashwood might not have had the time or the opportunity of observing all Middleton's limitations. She probably would imagine that he was a man of ideas and originality. She would take for granted (not knowing) that the head of an Oxford College was a weighty person, a successful person. Also Middleton was a good-looking-man, as good-looking as he, Boreham, was himself (only of a more conventional type), and therefore not to be despised from the mere woman's point of view.
Boreham peered eagerly at his companion's profile to see how she took this criticism of Middleton.
May was taking it quite calmly, and even smiled. "So far, good," said Boreham to himself, and he went on to compare his larger view of life and deeper knowledge of "facts" with the restricted outlook of the Oxford Don. This she apparently accepted as "understood," for she smiled again, and this triumph of Boreham's was achieved while they looked over the Christ Church library.
"The first thing," said Boreham, when they came again into the open air--"the first thing that a man has to do is to be a man of the world that we actually live in, not of the world as it was!"
"Yes," said Mrs. Dashwood "the world we actually live in."
"Oxford might have been vitalised; might, I say, if, by good luck, somebody had discovered a coal mine under the Broad, or the High, and the University had been compelled to adjust itself to the practical requirements of the world of labour and of commerce, and to drop its mediæval methods for those of the modern world."
May confessed that she had not thought of this way of improving the ancient University, but she suggested that some of the provincial universities had the advantage of being in the neighbourhood of coal mines or in industrial centres.
Boreham, however, waived the point, for his spirits were rising, and the sight of Bingham in the distance, carrying his table-cloth and slippers and looking wistfully at nothing in particular, gave him increased confidence in his main plan.