, to his dismay, something of a burden to him; he had been used to
ceaseless interruptions, multifarious engagements; the one struggle,
the one preoccupation, had been to win a few hours for solitude, for
reflection, for literary work. But now that the whole of time was at
his disposal, he found himself unable to concentrate his mind, to apply
himself. He had several friends at Cambridge; but the strain of making
new acquaintances, of familiarising himself with the temperaments and
the tastes of the new set of personalities, was very great. It was
impossible for Hugh to enter upon neutral, civil, colourless relations.
He could not meet a man or a woman without endeavouring to find some
common ground of sympathy and understanding. And this was made more
difficult to him at Cambridge by the swift monotony in which the years
had flowed away. Time seemed to have stood still there in those twenty
years. Many of the men that he remembered seemed still to be there,
contentedly pursuing the customary round, circulating from their rooms
to Hall, from Hall to Combination-room, and back again. Thus Hugh,
picking up the thread where he had laid it down, appeared to himself to
be youthful, inexperienced, insignificant; while to those who made his
acquaintance he seemed to be a grave and serious man of affairs, with a
standing in the world and a definite line of his own.

Thus the first months were months of some depression. Not that he
would have gone back if he could, or that he ever doubted of the
wisdom, the inevitableness of the step; even in moments of dejection it
cheered him to feel that he was not eating his heart out in fruitless
work, or solemnly performing a duty, which relied for seriousness upon
its outer place in a settled scheme, rather than upon any intrinsic
value that it possessed. But his life soon settled down into a steady
routine. He gave his morning to letters, business, and reading; his
afternoons to exercise, his evenings to writing and academical
sociabilities. His aim began gradually to be to make the most of the
sacred hours of the late afternoon, when his mind was most alert, and
when he seemed to possess the easiest mastery of language. He
consecrated those hours to his chosen work, and it was his object to
fit himself, as by a species of training, to make the most and best of
that good time, which lay like gold among the debris of the day. It
seemed to him that the solid, unimaginative work