t word. At such times his face had the
lines of age; you would have deemed him a man weighed upon by some vast
sorrow. And was he not? His life was speeding by; already the best
years were gone, the years of youth and force and hope--nay, hope he
could not be said to have known, unless it were for a short space when
first the purpose of his being dawned upon consciousness; and the end
of that had been bitter enough. The purpose he knew was frustrated. The
'Might have been,' which is 'also called No more, Too late, Farewell,'
often stared him in the eyes with those unchanging orbs of ghastliness,
chilling the flow of his blood and making life the cruellest of
mockeries. Yet he was not driven to that kind of resentment which makes
the revolutionary spirit. His personality was essentially that of a
student; conservative instincts were stronger in him than the misery
which accused his fortune. A touch of creative genius, and you had the
man whose song would lead battle against the hoary iniquities of the
world. That was denied him; he could only eat his own heart in despair,
his protest against the outrage of fate a desolate silence.

A lonely man, yet a tender one. The capacity of love was not less in
him than the capacity of knowledge. Yet herein too he was wronged by
circumstance. In youth an extreme shyness held him from intercourse
with all women save his mother and his sister; he was conscious of his
lack of ease in dialogue, of an awkwardness of manner and an
unattractiveness of person. On summer evenings, when other young
fellows were ready enough in finding companions for their walk, Gilbert
would stray alone in the quietest streets until he tired himself; then
go home and brood over fruitless longings. In love, as afterwards in
study, he had his ideal; sometimes he would catch a glimpse of some
face in the street at night, and would walk on with the feeling that
his happiness had passed him--if only he could have turned and pursued
it! In all women he had supreme faith; that one woman whom his heart
imagined was a pure and noble creature, with measureless aspiration,
womanhood glorified in her to the type of the upward striving soul--she
did not come to him; his life remained chaste and lonely.

Neither had he friends. There were at all times good fellows to be
found among those with whom he worked, but again his shyness held him
apart, and indeed he felt that intercourse with them would afford him
but brief sati