flame. He was impressionable; but the word is contradicted by the
composure with which he hollowed his hand to screen a match. He was a
young man of substance.

Anyhow, whether undergraduate or shop boy, man or woman, it must come as
a shock about the age of twenty--the world of the elderly--thrown up in
such black outline upon what we are; upon the reality; the moors and
Byron; the sea and the lighthouse; the sheep's jaw with the yellow teeth
in it; upon the obstinate irrepressible conviction which makes youth so
intolerably disagreeable--"I am what I am, and intend to be it," for
which there will be no form in the world unless Jacob makes one for
himself. The Plumers will try to prevent him from making it. Wells and
Shaw and the serious sixpenny weeklies will sit on its head. Every time
he lunches out on Sunday--at dinner parties and tea parties--there will
be this same shock--horror--discomfort--then pleasure, for he draws into
him at every step as he walks by the river such steady certainty, such
reassurance from all sides, the trees bowing, the grey spires soft in
the blue, voices blowing and seeming suspended in the air, the springy
air of May, the elastic air with its particles--chestnut bloom, pollen,
whatever it is that gives the May air its potency, blurring the trees,
gumming the buds, daubing the green. And the river too runs past, not at
flood, nor swiftly, but cloying the oar that dips in it and drops white
drops from the blade, swimming green and deep over the bowed rushes, as
if lavishly caressing them.

Where they moored their boat the trees showered down, so that their
topmost leaves trailed in the ripples and the green wedge that lay in
the water being made of leaves shifted in leaf-breadths as the real
leaves shifted. Now there was a shiver of wind--instantly an edge of
sky; and as Durrant ate cherries he dropped the stunted yellow cherries