The day before he went away, the Rhodes scholars invited Eugene to lunch. That was a fine meal: they ate together in their rooms in college, they had opened their purses to the college chef, and had told him not to spare himself but to go the limit. Before the meal they drank together a bottle of good sherry wine, and as they ate they drank the college ale, strong, brown, and mellow, and when they came to coffee, they all finished off on a bottle of port apiece.

There was a fine thick seasonable soup, of the colour of mahogany, and then a huge platter piled high with delicate brown-golden portions of filet of sole, and a roast of mutton, tender, fragrant, juicy and delicious as no other mutton that Eugene had ever eaten, with red currant jelly, well-seasoned sprouts, and boiled potatoes, to go with it, and at the end a fine apple-tart, thick cream, sharp cheese, and crackers.

It was a fine meal, and when they finished with it they were all happy and exultant. They were beautifully drunk and happy, with that golden, warm, full-bodied and most lovely drunkenness that can come only from good rich wine and mellow ale and glorious and abundant food — a state that we recognize instantly when it comes to us as one of the rare, the priceless, the unarguable joys of living, something stronger than philosophy, a treasure on which no price can be set, a sufficient reward for all the anguish, weariness, and disappointment of living, and a far better teacher than Aquinas ever was.

They were all young men and when they had finished they were drunk, glorious, and triumphant as only young men can be. It seemed to them now that they could do no wrong, or make no error, and that the whole earth was a pageantry of delight which had been shaped solely for their happiness, possession, and success. The Rhodes scholars no longer felt the old fear, confusion, loneliness, bitter inferiority and desolation of the soul which they had felt since coming there.

The beauty, age, and grandeur of the life about them were revealed as they had never been before, their own fortune in living in such a place seemed impossibly good and happy, nothing in this life around them now seemed strange or alien, and they all felt that they were going to win, and make their own, a life among the highest and most fortunate people on the earth.

As for Eugene, he now thought of his departure exultantly, and with intolerable desire, not from some joy of release, but because everything around him now seemed happy, glorious, and beautiful, and a token of unspeakable joys that were to come, a thousand images of trains, of the small rich-coloured joy and comfort and precision of their trains, of England, lost in fog, and swarming with its forty million lives, but suddenly not dreary, but impossibly small, and beautiful and near, to be taken at a stride, to be compassed at a bound, to enrich him, fill him, be his for ever in all its joy and mystery and magic smallness.

And he thought of the huge smoky web of London with this same joy: of the suave potent ale he could get in one place there, of its squares, and ancient courts, and age-grimed mysteries, and of the fog-numb strangeness of ten million passing men and women. He thought of the swift rich projectile of the channel train, the quays, the Channel boats, and darkness, night, the sudden onslaught of the savage choppy seas outside the harbour walls, and England fading, and the flashing beacon lights of France, the quays again, the little swarming figures, the excited tongues, the strange dark faces of the Frenchmen, the always-alien, magic, time-enchanted strangeness of the land, the people, and the faces; and then Paris, the nostalgic, subtle and incomparably exciting fabric of its life, its flavour, and its smell, the strange opiate of its time, the rediscovery of its food, its drink, the white, carnal, and luxurious bodies of the ladies of easy virtue.

They were all exultant, wild, full of joy and hope and invincible belief as they thought of all these things and all the glory and the mystery that the world held treasured for their taking in the depths of its illimitable resources; and they shouted, sang, shook hands and roared with laughter, and had no doubts, or fears, or dark confusions, as they had d............