'Just like Naples, Venice, and Heidelberg,' said Edie, half to
herself; but Berkeley caught at the words quickly as she said them.
'Yes,' he answered; 'a very good parallel, only Oxford has a trifle
more nature about it than Venice. The lagoon, without the palaces,
would be simply hideous; the Oseney flats, without the colleges,
would be nothing worse than merely dull.'

'We owe a great deal,' said Ernest, gazing out towards the quadrangle,
'to the forgotten mass of labouring humanity who piled all those
blocks of shapeless stone into beautiful forms for us who come after
to admire and worship. I often wonder, when I sit here in Berkeley's
window-seat, and look across the quad to the carved pinnacles on
the Founder's Tower there, whether any of us can ever hope to leave
behind to our successors any legacy at all comparable to the one
left us by those nameless old mediaeval masons. It's a very saddening
thought that we for whom all these beautiful things have been put
together--we whom labouring humanity has pampered and petted from
our cradles upward, feeding us on its whitest bread, and toiling
for us with all its weary sinews--that we probably will never do
anything at all for it and for the world in return, but will simply
eat our way through life aimlessly, and die forgotten in the end like
the beasts that perish. It ought to make us, as a class, terribly
ashamed of our own utter and abject inutility.'

Edie looked at him with a sort of hushed surprise; she was accustomed
to hear Harry talk radical talk enough after his own fashion, but
radicalism of this particular pensive tinge she was not accustomed
to. It interested her, and made her wonder what sort of man Mr. Le
Breton might really be.