Speed said: "Why on earth should I?"
"We sometimes find that people who're either very good or very bad do so. And you're very good."
"I'm so glad you think so." His face grew suddenly boyish with blushes.
"We all think so, Speed. And the Head likes you. We hope you'll stay."
"I'll stay all right. I'm too happy to want to go away."
Clanwell said meditatively: "It's a fine life if you're cut out for it, isn't it? I sometimes think there isn't a finer life in the whole world."
"I've always thought that."
"I hope you always will think it."
"And I hope so too."
Summer weather came like a strong flood about ten days after the opening of term, and then Millstead showed herself to him in all her serene and matchless beauty. He learned to know and expect the warm sunshine waking him in the mornings and creeping up the bed till it dazzled his eyes; he learned to know and to love the plick-plock of the cricket that was his music as he sat by the open window many an afternoon at work. And at night time, when the flaring gas jets winked in all the tiny windows and when there came upwards the cheerful smell of coffee-making in the studies, it was all as if some subtle alchemy were at work, transforming his soul into the mould and form of Millstead. Something fine and mighty was in the place, and his soul, passionately eager to yield itself, craved for that full possession which Millstead brought to it. The spell was swift and glorious. Sometimes he thought of Millstead almost as a lover; he would stroll round at night and drink deep of the witchery that love put into all that he saw and heard; the sounds of feet scampering along the passage outside his door, the cold lawns with the moon white upon them, the soft delicious flower-scents that rose up to his bedroom window at night. The chapel seemed to him, to put it epigrammatically, far more important because it belonged to Millstead than because it belonged to Christ. Millstead, stiff-collared and black-coated on a Sunday morning, and wondering what on earth it should do with itself on Sunday afternoon, touched him far more deeply than did the chatter of some smooth-voiced imported divine who knew Millstead only from spending a bored week-end at the Head's house. To Speed, sitting in the Masters' pew, and giving vent to his ever-ready imagination, Millstead seemed a personification of all that was youthful and clear-spirited and unwilling to pay any more than merely respectful attention to the exhortations of elders.