THE YEAR IN OXFORD

As the years passed there were happier periods, all of which have been recorded in ‘My Book and Heart.’ The years in Oxford, for example.

More than one circumstance contributed to the relaxation I enjoyed there. The prim academic life of the little college town was stimulating and refreshing to me after the hard and lean years in the itineracy. We were relieved from the burden of souls, and Lundy was absorbed in his work as teacher of Greek in the college. This is the one interest he had that I could not share. I had worried and prayed with him through all the Gospels, but when it came to feeling my way through the enclitics and iota subscripts of a dead cross-stitch language I had no conscience about leaving him to his fate.

Now that I look back, this is a queer circumstance, that I never had the least ambition to keep pace with my husband mentally. I was not uneasy lest he should escape me by this route, as I always felt he might do in those frightfully arduous pilgrimages he made toward God in the spirit. Anything might happen to such a traveler, I feared. But I have always enjoyed the assurance of having a very dexterous mind, regardless of whether I had as much information or intellectual training as the other person had or not.

This is no more a conceit than a man feels in the strength of his muscles. He is not disposed to skin the cat in order to prove his physical power. He is much more apt to sit down comfortably observant while some weaker man boasts of his biceps. I have done a lot of that kind of sitting down in my life. Nothing fans me into such a state of peaceful mental somnambulance as the intellectual antics of a person who displays his learning, not from vanity always, but frequently because it is all he has got; no real sense, no wisdom of his own, merely much good stuff he has learned from other sources. He spreads it like a garment as any other decent person would to hide the thinness of his shanks.

The literary life of Oxford was the most youthful and strident feature of this old college town. I do not know how the dean of the English department contrived to mislead so many young men, but year after year a certain per cent of the senior class were imbued with the idea that they had some kind of gift for literary creation or literary criticism. The latter predominated. During the winter months they shook the very battlements of English literature. They spared nobody from Henry Fielding to Dickens. Never shall I forget the way the feathers of the Brontë sisters used to fly when half a dozen of these young whelps seized upon ‘Jane Eyre.’ I was in my George Eliot stage at the time and suffered a graver mind, but I recall with no flattery to myself the