240

A Chef-d’CEuvre

companion that I vowed to see little of my enthusiast till his mania
had worn off. For weeks I saw nothing of him, and one day,
towards the end of term I was surprised to hear that he had been
“ sent down.” He had been out all night and could give no better
explanation than that he had gone out, and, forgetting rules and
time, had walked all through the night, till, at six o’clock in the
morning, he had astonished the porter by demanding admittance at
the lodge. Of course neither Don nor Undergraduate would
believe such a story, and so he was told that he would be rusti-
cated for a year. I went to see him before he departed. When
I got to his rooms, he was packing his books, and as I was trying
to say something by way of sympathy, he shrugged his shoulders
and told me that it was the first sacrifice his purpose demanded of
him, and he didn’t regret it. His people at home would not
understand him, but he should hope for as little unpleasantness as
his father’s time with the birds (it was November) would allow
him. And, after all, he said the ’Varsity was never kind to
dreamers.—“ Look at Shelley ! ”
Two years passed before I saw Alan again. During the year or
his rustication, we heard he was abroad, and I received an occasional
letter from him, sometimes from Spain and sometimes from Italy.
When the year was nearly over I got a long letter from him.
He told me that he could never come back to Oxford, with its
rigid rules and narrow ambitions.
“ I am going to-morrow,” so his letter, dated from Paris, ran,
“ to Croisset, there perhaps to feel the spirit of the great Master
steal over me. In the little rooms which I have taken I shall
study and ponder over that great life which devoted itself to
absolute perfection, and then when I feel I am sufficiently imbued
with the perfect spirit of the scholar and the artist, I shall come
to London and live quietly in my studio. How much nicer that
word