One of the far lighted windows belonged to Miranda. He was content to know she was there, and recalled, clear in his mind's eye, the lines and gestures of her face. The beauty he saw there had seemed almost to break his heart. It wavered upon him alternate with the stars and the dark trees of the garden. Loveliness and a perpetual riddle delicately lurked in the corners of her mouth. Sometimes, when they were together, he would lay his finger very softly on Miranda's lips.
He rarely kissed her. The flutter of his pulse died under an ecstasy bodiless as his passion for the painted sky. He did not yet love the girl who sometimes with a curious ferocity flung her arms about him and crushed his face against her shabby dress. Rather he loved the beauty of the world and his inspired ability, through her, to embrace it.
XI
The time had now come for Peter to be removed to Oxford. Amid all the novelty, the unimagined comfort and dignity, the beginning of new and exciting friendships, the first encounter with men of learning and position, Peter kept always a region of himself apart, whither he retired to dream of Miranda. He wrote her long and impassioned letters, pouring forth a flood of impetuous imagery wherein her kinship with all intense and lovely things persisted in a thousand shapes. But gradually, under many influences, a change prepared.
First, there was his contact with the intellectual life of Gamaliel. His inquisitive idealism gradually came down from heaven, summoned to definite earth by the ordered wisdom of Oxford. He had lately striven to catch, in a net of words, inexpressible beauty and elusive thought. But his desire to push expression to the limit of the comprehensible; his gift of nervous, pictorial speech; the crowding truths, half seen, that filled his brain were now opposed and estimated according to sure knowledge and the standards which measure a successful examinee. Truth, for ever about to show her face, at whose unsubstantial robe Peter had sometimes caught, now appeared formal, severe, gowned, and reading a schedule. All the knowledge of the world, it seemed, had been reduced to categories. Style was something that dead authors had once achieved. It could be ranged in periods and schools, some of which might with advantage be imitated. Peter found that concerning all things there were points of view. An acquaintance with these points of view and an ability rapidly to number them was almost the only kind of excellence his masters were able to reward.
The result of Peter's contact with the tidy, well-appointed wisdom of Gamaliel was disastrous. His imagination, starting adventurously into the unknown, was systematically checked. This or that question he was asking of the Sphinx was already answered. He fell from heaven upon a passage of Hegel or a theory of Westermarck.
Peter quickened his disillusion by the energy and zeal of his reading. He threw himself hungrily upon his books, and gloried in the ease with which wisdom could be won and stored for reference. His ardour for conquest, by map and ruler, of the kingdoms of knowledge lasted well through his first term. Only obscurely was he conscious of clipped wings.
Hard physical exercise also played a part in bringing Peter to the ground. He was put into training for the river, and was soon filled with a keen interest in his splendid thews. Stretched at length in the evening, warm with triumphant mastery of some theorem concerning the Absolute First Cause, Peter saw himself as typically a live intellectual animal. Less and less did he live in outer space. He began athletically to tread the earth.