ger work, unclouded
happiness. The perception of great problems, noble thoughts, seemed in
these reminiscences to have fallen on chivalrous minds with a deep
natural joy. They recorded hours of matchless talk, ingenuous debate,
brilliant wit, scintillating intellect. Hugh liked to believe that
this was the case, but he often wondered whether it was not all
heightened by retrospect, and whether the radiance of the whole picture
was not merely the radiance of recollected youth. If the picture was a
true one, then the later years of the men whose lives were thus told,
of whom more than one were known personally to Hugh, must have been
years of sad physical and mental decline. There was one person in
particular, an eminent ecclesiastic, who had been a frequent guest at
his father's house, in whom Hugh had never discovered any particular
swiftness of perception, of agility of mind, yet the reminiscences of
whose undergraduate years were given in a vein of high enthusiasm.
This worthy clergyman had seemed, if his memory was to be trusted, to
have been the shining centre of a group whose life threw the life of
young Athens, as represented by Plato, into the shade. The man in
question seemed, in later years, a sturdily built clergyman, slow and
cautious of speech, brusque and even grim of address, sensible, devoted
to commonplace activities, and with a due appreciation of the comforts
and conveniences of life. His conversation had no suggestiveness or
subtlety. He was grumpy in the morning and good-humoured in the
evening. He seemed impatient of new ideas, and endowed with a firm
grasp of conventional and obvious notions.

Hugh's own recollection of his university days was very different, and
yet he had lived in what might be called an intellectual set. There
had been plenty of easy friendship, abundance of lively gossip,
incessant and rather tedious festivities. Men had groaned and grumbled
over their work, played games with hearty conviction, had nourished no
great illusions about themselves and each other, had had few generous
and ardent visions about art, poetry, or humanity; or, if they had,
they had kept them to themselves with a very good show of contented
indifference. There was indeed a little society to which Hugh had
belonged, where books, and not very recondite ideas, of ethical or
moral import, were discussed freely and amiably, without affectation,
and occasionally with a certain amount of animation.