hed an air that set him and kept him in motion. There had been
something in it that went to his head--an element that his mother and
his sisters, his father from beyond the grave, Julia Dallow, the Liberal
party and a hundred friends, were both secretly and overtly occupied in
pumping into it. If he but half-believed in victory he at least liked
the wind of the onset in his ears, and he had a general sense that when
one was "stuck" there was always the nearest thing at which one must
pull. The embarrassment, that is the revival of scepticism, which might
produce an inconsistency shameful to exhibit and yet difficult to
conceal, was safe enough to come later. Indeed at the risk of presenting
our young man as too whimsical a personage I may hint that some such
sickly glow had even now begun to tinge one quarter of his inward
horizon.

I am afraid, moreover, that I have no better excuse for him than the one
he had touched on in that momentous conversation with his mother which
I have thought it useful to reproduce in full. He was conscious of a
double nature; there were two men in him, quite separate, whose leading
features had little in common and each of whom insisted on having an
independent turn at life. Meanwhile then, if he was adequately aware
that the bed of his moral existence would need a good deal of making
over if he was to lie upon it without unseemly tossing, he was also
alive to the propriety of not parading his inconsistencies, not letting
his unregulated passions become a spectacle to the vulgar. He had none
of that wish to appear deep which is at the bottom of most forms of
fatuity; he was perfectly willing to pass for decently superficial; he
only aspired to be decently continuous. When you were not suitably
shallow this presented difficulties; but he would have assented to the
proposition that you must be as subtle as you can and that a high use of
subtlety is in consuming the smoke of your inner fire. The fire was the
great thing, not the chimney. He had no view of life that counted out
the need of learning; it was teaching rather as to which he was
conscious of no particular mission. He enjoyed life, enjoyed it
immensely, and was ready to pursue it with patience through as many
channels as possible. He was on his guard, however, against making an
ass of himself, that is against not thinking out his experiments before
trying them in public. It was because, as yet, he liked life in general
better than i