w, happy and useful.
Afterwards, in the drawing-room, I sate beside my host. I saw Maud
listening, with rapt interest, to the chronicles of all the village
families, robustly and unimaginatively told by the parson's wife;
meanwhile I, tortured by intolerable ennui, pumped up questions, tried
a hundred subjects with my worthy host. He told me long and prolix
stories, he discoursed on rural needs. At last I said that we must be
going; he replied with genuine disappointment that the night was still
young, and that it was a pity to break up our pleasant confabulation. I
saw with a shock of wonder that he had evidently been enjoying himself
hugely; that it was a pleasure to him, for some unaccountable reason,
not to hear a new person talk, but to say the same things that he had
said for years, to a new person. It is not ideas that most people want;
they are satisfied with mere gregariousness, the sight and sound of
other figures. They like to produce the same stock of ideas, the same
conclusions. "As I always say," was a phrase that was for ever on my
entertainer's lips. I suppose that probably my own range is just as
limited, but I have an Athenian hankering after novelty of thought, the
new mintage of the mind. I loathe the old obliterated coinage, with the
stamp all rounded and faint. Dulness, sameness, triteness, are they
essential parts of life? I suppose it is really that my nervous energy
is low, and requires stimulus: if it were strong and full, the current
would flow into the trivial things. I derive a certain pleasure from
the sight of other people's rooms, the familiar, uncomfortable, shabby
furniture, the drift of pictures, the debris of ornament--all that
stands for difference and individuality. But one can't get inside most
people's minds; they only admit one to the public rooms. A crushing
fatigue and depression settles down upon me in such hours, and then the
old blank sense of grief and loss comes flowing back--it is old
already, because it seems to have stained all the backward pages of
life; then follows the weary, restless night; and the breaking of the
grey, pitiless dawn.

June 3, 1890.

I do not want, even in my thoughts, to put the contemplative life above
the practical life. Highest of all I would put a combination of the
two--a man of high and clear ideals, in a position where he was able to
give them shape--a great constructive statesman, a great educator, a
great man of business, who was als