"The one you never answered?"

"I answer none of your letters. You are quite hopeless by now.
You can go to the bad. But I refuse to accompany you. I refuse to
believe that every human being is a moving wonder of supreme
interest and tragedy and beauty--which was what the letter in
question amounted to. You'll find plenty who will believe it.
It's a very popular view among people who are too idle to think;
it saves them the trouble of detecting the beautiful from the
ugly, the interesting from the dull, the tragic from the
melodramatic. You had just come from Sawston, and were apparently
carried away by the fact that Miss Pembroke had the usual amount
of arms and legs."

Rickie was silent. He had told his friend how he felt, but not
what had happened. Ansell could discuss love and death admirably,
but somehow he would not understand lovers or a dying man, and in
the letter there had been scant allusion to these concrete facts.
Would Cambridge understand them either? He watched some dons who
were peeping into an excavation, and throwing up their hands with
humorous gestures of despair. These men would lecture next week
on Catiline's conspiracy, on Luther, on Evolution, on Catullus.
They dealt with so much and they had experienced so little. Was
it possible he would ever come to think Cambridge narrow? In his
short life Rickie had known two sudden deaths, and that is enough
to disarrange any placid outlook on the world. He knew once for
all that we are all of us bubbles on an extremely rough sea. Into
this sea humanity has built, as it were, some little
breakwaters--scientific knowledge, civilized restraint--so that
the bubbles do not break so frequentlv or so soon. But the sea