However, when it came to the evenings, Michael was at a loss. He could not dance nor talk small talk. He was too intensely in earnest for society's ways, and they did not understand. He could talk about the books he had read, and the things he had thought, but they were great thoughts and not at all good form for a frivolous company to dwell upon. One did not want a problem in economics or a deep philosophical question thrust upon one at a dance. Michael became a delightful but difficult proposition for the girls present, each one undertaking to teach him how to talk in society, but each in turn making a miserable failure. At last Emily Holt herself set out to give him gentle hints on light conversation and found herself deep in a discussion of Wordsworth's poems about which she knew absolutely nothing, and in which Michael's weary soul had been steeping itself lately.

Miss Holt retired in laughing defeat, at last, and advised her protégé to take a course of modern novels. Michael, always serious, took her at her word, and with grave earnestness proceeded to do so; but his course ended after two or three weeks. He found them far from his taste, the most of them too vividly portraying the sins of his alley in a setting of high life. Michael had enough of that sort of thing in real life, and felt he could not stand the strain of modern fiction, so turned back to his Wordsworth again and found soothing and mental stimulus.