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living anywhere but in New York.'
    I left soon after this, but before I did Elliott, I hardly know why, asked me if I would lunch with him to meet the Maturins, father and son.
    'Henry is the best type of the American businessman,' he said, 'and I think you ought to know him. He's looked after our investments for many years.'
    I hadn't any particular wish to do this, but no reason to refuse, so I said I would be glad to.

7
    I had been put up for the length of my stay at a club which possessed a good library, and next morning I went there to look at one or two of the university magazines that for the person who does not subscribe to them have always been rather hard to come by. It was early and there was only one other person there. He was seated in a big leather chair absorbed in a book. I was surprised to see it was Larry. He was the last person I should have expected to find in such a place. He looked up as I passed, recognized me and made as if to get up.
    'Don't move,' I said, and then almost automatically: 'What are you reading?'
    'A book,' he said, with a smile, but a smile so engaging that the rebuff of his answer was in no way offensive.
    He closed it and looking at me with his peculiarly opaque eyes held it so that I couldn't see the title.
    'Did you have a good time last night?' I asked.
    'Wonderful. Didn't get home till five.'
    'It's very strenuous of you to be here so bright and early.'
    'I come here a good deal. Generally I have the place to myself at this time.'
    'I won't disturb you.'
    'You're not disturbing me,' he said, smiling again, and now it occurred to me that he had a smile of great sweetness. It was not a brilliant, flashing smile, it was a smile that lit his face as with an inner light. He was sitting in an alcove made by jutting out shelves and there was a chair next to him. He put his hand on the arm. 'Won't you sit down for a minute?'
    'All right.'
    He handed me the book he was holding.
    'That's what I was reading.'
    I looked at it and saw it was William James's Principles of Psychology. It is, of course, a standard work and important in the history of the science with which it deals; it is moreover exceedingly readable; but it is not the sort of book I should have expected to see in the hands of a very young man, an aviator, who had been dancing till five in the morning.
    'Why are you reading this?' I asked.
    'I'm very ignorant.'
    'You're also very young,' I smiled.
    He did not speak for so long a time that I began to find the silence awkward and I was on the point of getting up and looking for the magazines I had come to find. But I had a feeling that he wanted to say something. He looked into vacancy, his face grave and intent, and seemed to meditate. I waited. I was curious to know what it was all about. When he began to speak it was as though he were continuing the conversation without awareness of that long silence.
    'When I came back from France they all wanted me to go to college. I couldn't. After what I'd been through I felt I couldn't go back to school. I learnt nothing at my prep school anyway. I felt I couldn't enter into a freshman's life. They wouldn't have liked me. I didn't want to act a part I didn't feel. And I didn't think the instructors would teach me the sort of things I wanted to know.'
    'Of course I know this is no business of mine,' I answered, 'but I'm not convinced you were right. I think I understand what you mean and I can see that, after being in the war for two years, it would have been rather a nuisance to become the sort of glorified schoolboy an undergraduate is during his first and second years. I can't believe they wouldn't have liked you. I don't know much about American universities, but I don't believe American undergraduates are very different from English ones, perhaps a little more boisterous and a little more inclined to horseplay, but on the whole very decent, sensible boys, and I take it that if you don't want to lead their lives they're quite willing,