other everything, everything, "all I could never be"--yes, though next
day, buying his newspaper and catching the early train, it all seemed to
him childish, absurd; the chocolate cake, the young men; Sopwith summing
things up; no, not all; he would send his son there. He would save every
penny to send his son there.

Sopwith went on talking; twining stiff fibres of awkward speech--things
young men blurted out--plaiting them round his own smooth garland,
making the bright side show, the vivid greens, the sharp thorns,
manliness. He loved it. Indeed to Sopwith a man could say anything,
until perhaps he'd grown old, or gone under, gone deep, when the silver
disks would tinkle hollow, and the inscription read a little too simple,
and the old stamp look too pure, and the impress always the same--a
Greek boy's head. But he would respect still. A woman, divining the
priest, would, involuntarily, despise.

Cowan, Erasmus Cowan, sipped his port alone, or with one rosy little
man, whose memory held precisely the same span of time; sipped his port,
and told his stories, and without book before him intoned Latin, Virgil
and Catullus, as if language were wine upon his lips. Only--sometimes it
will come over one--what if the poet strode in? "THIS my image?" he
might ask, pointing to the chubby man, whose brain is, after all,
Virgil's representative among us, though the body gluttonize, and as for
arms, bees, or even the plough, Cowan takes his trips abroad with a
French novel in his pocket, a rug about his knees, and is thankful to be
home again in his place, in his line, holding up in his snug little
mirror the image of Virgil, all rayed round with good stories of the
dons of Trinity and red beams of port. But language is wine upon his
lips. Nowhere else would Virgil hear the like. And though, as she goes
sauntering along the Backs, old Miss Umphelby sings him melodiously