intimate mentor and lasting friend. His sixty odd years, and the streaks
of grey in his red straggling locks, his European reputation as a
scholar and thinker, his old sister, and his quiet house, forbade the
slightest breath of scandal in connection with these girl-friendships.
Yet the girls to whom the Master devoted himself, whose essays he read,
whose blunders he corrected, whose schools he watched over, and in whose
subsequent love affairs he took the liveliest interest, were rarely or
never plain to look upon. He chose them for their wits, but also for
their faces. His men friends observed it with amusement. The little
notes he wrote them, the birthday presents he sent them--generally some
small worn copy of a French or Latin classic--his coveted invitations,
or congratulations, were all marked by a note of gallantry, stately and
old-fashioned like the furniture of his drawing-room, but quite
different from anything he ever bestowed upon the men students of
his college.

Of late he had lost two of his chief favourites. One, a delicious
creature, with a head of auburn hair and a real talent for writing
verse, had left Oxford suddenly to make a marriage so foolish that he
really could not forgive her or put up with her intolerable husband; and
the other, a muse, with the brow of one and the slenderest hand and
foot, whom he and others were hopefully piloting towards a second class
at least--possibly a first--in the Honour Classical School, had broken
down in health, so that her mother and a fussy doctor had hurried
her away to a rest-cure in Switzerland, and thereby slit her
academic life and all her chances of fame. Both had been used to
come--independently--for the Master was in his own, way far too great a
social epicure to mix his pleasures--to tea on Sundays; to sit on one
side of a blazing fire, while the Master sat on the other, a Persian cat
playing chaperon on the rug between, and the book-lined walls of the