eliefs. He had begun with a firm faith in systems and
institutions; he had ended by basing all his hopes on the individual.
He had begun by looking for beauty and perfection wherever he was told
to expect it; if he had not discerned it, he had blamed his own dulness
of perception. It had been a heavy and soulless business; and the real
freshness of life, intellectual curiosity, mental independence, seemed
to have come to him in fullest measure, just at the age when most men
seemed to have parted with those qualities. As an undergraduate, he
had been more aware of fitfulness and weariness than anything; only
gradually had he become conscious of concentration, sustained zest,
intention. Then he had tended to condemn enthusiasm as a species of
defective manners. Now he lived by its steady light. Then he had been
at the mercy of a new idea, an attractive personality. He shuddered to
think how easily he had made friendships, and how contemptuously he had
broken them the moment he was disappointed. Now he weighed and tested
more; but at the same time he also opened his heart and his thoughts
far more deliberately and frankly to sympathetic and generous people.

Hugh seemed to have found rather than to have lost his youth. His
actual youth, indeed, seemed to him to have been a tremulous and
listless thing, full of fears and sensibilities, feminine, unbalanced,
frivolous. Life had so far been to Hugh pure gain. Looking back he
saw himself irresolute, vague, sentimental, incapable of application,
unmethodical, half-hearted. He had had none of the buoyancy, the
splendid dreams, the sparkling ambitions that seemed, according to the
records, to have been the stuff of great men's youth.

He sate one day in the ante-chapel of his old college, through a
morning service, listening, as in a dream, to the sweet singing within;
it seemed but a day since he had sate in his stall, a fitful-hearted
boy. The service ended, and the procession streamed out, the rich
tints of the windows lighting up the faces and the white surplices of
the men, old and young, that issued from the dark door of the screen.
Hugh felt within himself that he would not have the old days back again
even if he could; he was nothing but grateful for the balance, the
serenity, that life had brought him. He was conscious of greater
strength, undimmed energy, increased zest; faltering indeed he was
still, not better, not more unselfish; but he had a sense of t