ys, and
in the whole process of the education of character. But there was
also another reason, which the following letter will explain:

"You know, perhaps, that I have been acting as usher here for a year;
it is to be a kind of probation. That is to say, I have promised to
try what it is like for a year, and see if I feel inclined to adopt
it as my profession.

"Now, I am in a very curious position. I do feel inclined, very much
inclined indeed, to stick permanently to the work; it interests,
amuses, occupies me. I hate the want of occupation. I hate making
occupations for myself, and this provides me with regular work at
stated hours, leaving other stated hours free, and free in the best
way; that is to say, it works the vapours off. My brain feels clear
and steady; I can talk, think, write, read better, in those intervals
than I ever can when all my time is my own, and yet--I must, I
believe, give it up.

"You know I pretend to a kind of familiar; like Socrates, I am
forbidden to do certain things by a kind of distant inward voice--not
conscience, for it is not limited to moral choice. I don't mean to
say I do not or have not disobeyed it, but it is always the worse for
me in the end; it is like taking a short cut in the mountains; you
get to your end in time, but far more tired and shaky than if you had
followed the right road, which started so much to the left among the
pines, and moreover, you get there very much behind your party.

"This time it tells me that I am not equal to the direct
responsibility; that I can not, with my habits of mind and temper,
impress a permanent enough mark upon the lads. It is like beginning a
system of education that is to take, say, thirty years, giving them a
year of it, and then taking to another; you not only lose your year,
but you unfit them for other systems. That is what I should do; my
methods do not prepare them for other normal education; it is only
the beginning of a preparation for what I believe to be a higher and
more complete education, but that wouldn't justify my keeping on.

"I do not believe that I have done any harm; in fact, my theory would
forbid me to think so; but it also informs me that my _role_ is
not to be that of a schoolmaster.

"I shall be a poor man, of course; poor, that is, for an independent
gentleman. I wish I were a Fellow of a College at Cambridge; I would
try and be as ideal as Gray in that position."

CHAPTER V

In April he