That was where, for the future, his life was to be passed, not idly, sitting under trees, but in the eager pursuit of its unnumbered paths.

It was that aspect of it which, as he knew so well, his father, for instance, would never be able to understand.

To Lord Ashbridge's mind, music was vaguely connected with white waistcoats and opera glasses and large pink carnations; he was congenitally incapable of viewing it in any other light than a diversion, something that took place between nine and eleven o'clock in the evening, and in smaller quantities at church on Sunday morning.

He would undoubtedly have said that Handel's Messiah was the noblest example of music in the world, because of its subject; music did not exist for him as a separate, definite and infinite factor of life; and since it did not so exist for himself, he could not imagine it existing for anybody else.

That Michael correctly knew to be his father's general demeanour towards life; he wanted everybody in their respective spheres to be like what he was in his.