It was at Oxford that he passed from the first to the second of his three phases. We were none of us more than a few months distant from the untravelled world of men's work—sub-consciously we were all striving after a self-expression that should leave its mark on that work. Heaven be thanked! not one of us dreamed how ineffective our personalities were to prove, how unromantic our humdrum work, how meagre our hard-bought results! In the twelve years that passed between these last terms and the outbreak of a war that at least brought spaciousness back to human life, I can think of only one of my friends who failed to become in greater or less degree commonplace. That was O'Rane, and his store of the romantic could never quite be exhausted. He was too fearless of soul. A commonplace mind and life are the lot of the conventional, and conventionality is the atmosphere in which alone the timid can exist. To defy a convention may not gain a man the whole world, but it not infrequently saves his soul.
O'Rane came up in my last year as one of a mixed draft from Melton. Mayhew and Sam Dainton we knew, but the others were little more than names to us. Dutifully Loring and I gave a couple of Sunday breakfasts and sighed when our guest left us for a walk round the Parks before luncheon. The meals were as difficult as they were long, for the freshmen were shy, and we had outgrown our taste for early morning banquets. When conversation was fanned into life, we found it sadly juvenile. Were we not fourth-year men, a thought jaded, and with difficulty interested in anecdotes of a scout's eccentricities or descriptions of unsuccessful flight from proctors? When the last guest pocketed his half-guinea straight-grained pipe (which we had been forced to admire) and clattered down the stairs to walk a dejected terrier of mixed ancestry through Oxford, Loring shook his head despairingly.
"We were not like that, George," he asserted.
"We were rather a good year, of course," I agreed.
He emptied a succession of ash trays, thoughtfully replaced the cushions on the sofas and straightened the antimacassars.
"Twelve of them, weren't there?" he asked. "And they'll all invite us back, every jack man of them."
"And we shall have to go, too," I also sighed, "and make sport for them, after waiting half an hour in a room full of unknown while our host hurriedly splashes himself next door and apologizes for having forgotten all about the invitation.
"We never did that!"
"Once," I said.