Jude showed that he did not understand.
"Why, to the seat of l'arning--the 'City of Light' you used to talk
to us about as a little boy! Is it all you expected of it?"
"Yes; more!" cried Jude.
"When I was there once for an hour I didn't see much in it for my
part; auld crumbling buildings, half church, half almshouse, and not
much going on at that."
"You are wrong, John; there is more going on than meets the eye of a
man walking through the streets. It is a unique centre of thought
and religion--the intellectual and spiritual granary of this country.
All that silence and absence of goings-on is the stillness of
infinite motion--the sleep of the spinning-top, to borrow the simile
of a well-known writer."
"Oh, well, it med be all that, or it med not. As I say, I didn't see
nothing of it the hour or two I was there; so I went in and had a pot
o' beer, and a penny loaf, and a ha'porth o' cheese, and waited till
it was time to come along home. You've j'ined a college by this
time, I suppose?"
"Ah, no!" said Jude. "I am almost as far off that as ever."
"How so?"
Jude slapped his pocket.
"Just what we thought! Such places be not for such as you--only for
them with plenty o' money."
"There you are wrong," said Jude, with some bitterness. "They are
for such ones!"
Still, the remark was sufficient to withdraw Jude's attention from
the imaginative world he had lately inhabited, in which an abstract
figure, more or less himself, was steeping his mind in a sublimation
of the arts and sciences, and making his calling and election sure
to a seat in the paradise of the learned. He was set regarding his
prospects in a cold northern light. He had lately felt that he
could not quite satisfy himself in his Greek--in the Greek of
the dramatists particularly. So fatigued was he sometimes after
his day's work that he could not maintain the critical attention
necessary for thorough application. He felt that he wanted a
coach--a friend at his elbow to tell him in a moment what sometimes
would occupy him a weary month in extracting from unanticipative,
clumsy books.
It was decidedly necessary to consider facts a little more closely
than he had done of late. What was the good, after all, of using
up his spare hours in a vague labour called "private study" without
giving an outlook on practicabilities?