the Holy Roman Empire and today, but the time had glided away while he drank tea with Sophie, or sat in his rooms thinking about past teas with Sophie and teas to come. It had been like bailing out a boat that leaked faster than one could empty, so why bail? And he was drowning academically,—a novel sensation, lugubriously pleasant. Some drowning people were able to see their whole past in vivid detail. Not he; he saw his future, and as he saw it he did a problem in subtraction on the back of his examination paper: three score and ten minus twenty-two,—forty-eight whole years in which to look backward at the days when he was too young to be a failure.
The breeze rustled the paper mockingly: he wished it would blow it on the floor. The sun gilded the down on his arm: such a harmless arm compared with the hirsute limb across the aisle driving answers into its notebook before they could escape. 'Armless harm, Max would have said. What good was it going to do them all, knowing what Shakespeare had meant by "Saint Nicholas be thy speed." Or were they merely guessing? Might it not be wise to guess too, and say something about Santa Claus and his reindeer? On the whole no, for if it were wrong, it would be such palpable fraud, and it wasn't, after all, an examination in Ingenuity,—if it only were! That was what was wrong with education. Would that be a Mantegna print on the wall, if one were a little surer about art?
If one were going to fail, wasn't it more sublime to
