"You ran away from home lately and were out all night?"
Philip bit his lip. "Yes, sir."
"You're too old for that mock-romantic sort of thing. There's a strain of it in your essays. Mr. Gibson sent me up your essay on Julius Cæsar—something about 'he shall endure while the luminaries of history rot in oblivion!' Luminaries don't rot. Leave all that to the journalists, my boy, you can do better stuff. It wasn't only mock-romantic, it was cruel! Can you imagine how your mother slept that night? I'm rather ashamed of you. It was selfish. It was a pose."
"But you don't know, sir, what had happened the day before. I was nearly dead."
"I can understand. Public speaking, Socialism! All in their time! You're forcing things, you'll burn out and be cinders when you ought to be a man. No, you've not got the foundation for it. You've been slacking in form. What is it you go to poetry for, do you know?"
"I can't say, sir. Beauty, perhaps?"
"Yes, beauty! You don't know the beauty of labour, though. When you've mastered your Cæsar and your Greek Grammar—dull work, my boy, dull work!—you'll find poetry finer than Shelley, the poetry Shelley thought made his own like a marsh-lamp, the poetry of the Greeks. You started well, but your place in form has been going down steadily. Listen, Philip," he drew the boy nearer to him, "there's the question of your scholarship. Think what it'll mean to her if anything happened to your scholarship. You're not going to allow it, are you? And if you go down as steadily as you have been going down of late, I don't see what else can happen. What do you feel?"
There was a lump in Philip's throat. "I don't want anything to happen which will hurt her."
"Well, Philip, we understand each other. Put your hand to the plough like a man. Make a clean furrow and a deep one. I don't think we need say more, need we? Come and see me when you've made a fresh discovery in poetry, we'll talk about him. So good-bye now, Philip!"
Philip took the big man's hand and withdrew, feeling at once tearful, chastened, and absurdly exalted, and a solemn determination now possessed him to do some serious work before the examination which ended the year. Every evening he withdrew to his own back room which, out of most unpromising materials, his mother had converted into the semblance of a study. She had inserted ledges into soap boxes where his textbooks and poets were ranged above frills of pinky-white paper. She had covered the doddering table with a neat piece of parti-coloured cloth. A few bright pictures from magazines were tacked upon the walls. In recognition of the new spirit of industry earnestly avowed before her she substituted for the deficiently-seated chair a rocking-chair which gave Philip an especial delight and won him to sympathy with aorist tenses and the optative mood. Not a word passed between Reb Monash and Philip. No current of sympathy ran to connect them. Philip displayed no readiness to compromise in the matter of a more ardent ritual. He would gabble off his prayers as quickly as possible, and then, with no attempt to hide his relief, turn to his books. His prayers were still tolerable, if barely, during the period when he lavished his enthusiasm on active Socialism. Now that he began to forswear his Socialistic delights, they began to be dust in his mouth. The half-hour long morning prayers of which he might understand one word in twenty, so wrought upon his nerves, that he felt like crying aloud sharply, particularly during that section of the devotion when he stood towards the East, placing together the inner sides of his feet, looking blankly through the wall into nothingness. One morning, during the sheer meaningless drift of his utterance, he curiously found himself repeating something of sweet and significant import. He was reciting, not the torpid Hebrew, but the languorous chimes of "Ulalume." Delightedly he continued the poem to its end and once more repeated it, till he realized that the time expected from him in the recapitulation of the "Nineteen Prayers" was at an end. He completed his morning's devotion with "Alastor." He had made a valuable discovery. The ennui of prayer was not now to gloom his faculties thrice daily. He could now pass in pageant before him all the comely shapes of poetry he had known.