“Ah, but with this as a haven of refuge--the grey walls, the cool cloisters, the peaceful charm of rooms like these looking out on to these beautiful, untroubled gardens.”
“I don't know,” said Raine. “Loving Oxford as I do, I sometimes breathe more freely out of it. There is too much intellectual _mise en scène_ in all this. If you get it on your mind that you are expected to live up to it, you are rapidly qualifying yourself for the newest undergraduate culture-society, at a college that shall be nameless. Many a man is ruined by it.”
“But, my dear Chetwynd,” said the Junior Dean, “there is a difference between loving 'to walk the studious cloysters pale' and intellectual priggishness.”
“Doubtless. But it isn't everyone who can walk honestly. The danger lies in finding another fellow doing the same. Then the two of you join together and say how beautiful it is, and you call in a third to share the sensation, and you proceed to admire yourselves as being vastly superior meditative persons. Then finally, according to modern instinct, you throw it into a Pale Cloyster Company, Limited, which is Anathema.”
“Switzerland will do you good, Chetwynd,” remarked the Junior Dean quickly. “Particularly as your mind is so disorganized as to misinterpret Milton.”
Raine laughed, stretched himself lazily after the manner of big men, and lounged back on the window-sill, his hands in his pockets.
“I don't care. I'd misinterpret anybody--even you. I've had enough of Oxford for a time. You see I have had a long spell since January. There were Entrance Scholarships and a lot of bursarial work for Evans to be done that kept me up nearly all the Easter vacation. I suppose you are right. I want a change.”
“The mountain air would be better for you than a stuffy town.”
“Oh, good gracious!” laughed Raine, swelling out his deep chest, “I am healthy enough. You don't presume to say I am pale with overwork!”
“No,” said the Junior Dean, mentally contrasting his own spare form with his colleague's muscular development. “You have a constitution like an ox. But you would get better air into your lungs and better rest in your mind.”
“Well, perhaps you are right,” said Raine. “Anyhow, if Geneva gets too hot for me, I can come to you and sit on the top of the Jungfrau with some snow on my head and get cool.”
