"You remember Filmer," Hicks writes to his friend Vance; "well,
HE hasn't altered a bit, the same hostile mumble and the nasty
chin--how CAN a man contrive to be always three days from shaving?
-- and a sort of furtive air of being engaged in sneaking in front
of one; even his coat and that frayed collar of his show no further
signs of the passing years. He was writing in the library and
I sat down beside him in the name of God's charity, whereupon
he deliberately insulted me by covering up his memoranda. It seems
he has some brilliant research on hand that he suspects me of all
people--with a Bodley Booklet a-printing!--of stealing. He has taken
remarkable honours at the University--he went through them with
a sort of hasty slobber, as though he feared I might interrupt him
before he had told me all--and he spoke of taking his D.Sc. as one
might speak of taking a cab. And he asked what I was doing--with
a sort of comparative accent, and his arm was spread nervously,
positively a protecting arm, over the paper that hid the precious
idea--his one hopeful idea.

"'Poetry,' he said, 'Poetry. And what do you profess to teach
in it, Hicks?'

"The thing's a Provincial professorling in the very act of budding,
and I thank the Lord devoutly that but for the precious gift
of indolence I also might have gone this way to D.Sc. and
destruction . . ."

A curious little vignette that I am inclined to think caught Filmer
in or near the very birth of his discovery. Hicks was wrong in
anticipating a provincial professorship for Filmer. Our next glimpse