of the morning cleared
away a certain heaviness and sluggishness of apprehension, which was
the shadow of sleep; that the open air, the active movement of the
afternoon, removed the clumsier and grosser insistence of the body; and
that there resulted a frame of mind, when the imagination was lively
and alert, and when the willing brain served out its stores with a
cordial rapidity. There was a danger perhaps of selfish absorption in
such a scheme of life; but at least no artist ever more sedulously
cultivated the best and most fruitful conditions for the practice of
his art. Hugh grew to have an almost morbid sense of the value of
time. Interruptions, social entertainments, engagements which
interfered with his programme, he resented and resolutely avoided. He
became indeed aware that other people, to whom the value of his work
was not apparent, were apt to regard the jealous arrangement of his
hours as the mere whim of a self-absorbed dilettante. But that
troubled Hugh little, because he realised that his only hope of doing
sound and worthy work lay in making a sacrifice of the ordinary and
trifling occupations of life, of forming definite habits, for the want
of which so many capable and brilliant persons sink into
unproductiveness.

Yet the life had a danger which Hugh did not at first perceive. It
tended to concentrate his thoughts too much upon himself. His writings
took on a personal colour, a warm, self-regarding light, of which his
candid friends did not hesitate to make him aware. The bitterness of
the slow progress of a book, and of the long time that must elapse
between its execution and its appearance, is that the readers of it
tend to consider that it reflects the exact contemporary thought of its
writer. Hugh's mind and personality grew fast in those days; and by
the time that his friends were criticising a book as the outcome of his
immediate thought, he was feeling himself that it was but a milestone
on the road, marking a spot that he had left leagues behind him.

But the creative instinct, which had struggled fitfully with the hard
practical conditions of his professional life, now took a sudden bound
forward. His writing became the one important thing in the world for
Hugh. He had gained, he found, through constant practice, dry as the
labour had been, a considerable fluency and firmness of touch: now
sentences shaped themselves under his hand like living things; words
flowed easily from