e
path might reveal his bright coming to the faithful eye.

XIII

Waiting for Light

The charm of the Cambridge life was to Hugh the alternation of society
and solitude. He was soon fortunate enough to obtain a post at his old
college, and to be allotted a set of rooms there. He was sociably
enough inclined, and the stir and movement of the minute society was
interesting and enlivening. He had a little definite work to do, and
he tried to cultivate relations with every one in the college. It was
pleasant that he had no connection with disciplinary matters; and thus
he was able to enter into a friendly intercourse with the
undergraduates, not checked or hampered by any necessity to find fault
or to offer advice. He occupied his rooms during term-time, and lived
the life of the college with quiet enjoyment. But he retained his
little house as well, and when the vacation began, he retired there,
and spent his days much in solitude. He preferred this indeed to the
life of the college, but he was well aware that it owed half its
pleasure to its being an interlude in the busier life. But it was thus
that what he felt were his best thoughts came to him; thoughts, that is
to say, that pierced below the surface, and had a quality of reality
which his mind, when he was employed and full of schemes, often seemed
to himself to lack. But, like all speculative people who spend much
time in solitary thought, he seemed to himself very soon to cross the
debateable ground in which people of definite religious views appeared
to him to linger gladly. Here he left behind all the persons who
depended upon systems. Here remained Roman Catholics, who depended
chiefly upon the authority and tradition of the Church, and
Protestants, depending no less blindly and complacently upon the
authority of the Bible. The real and crucial difficulty lay further
on; and it was simply this: he saw a world full of joy, and full too of
suffering; sometimes one of his fellow-pilgrims would be stricken down
with some incurable malady, and through slow gradations of pain, sink
wretchedly to death; was this suffering remedial, educative,
benevolent? He hoped it was, he believed that it was, in the sense, at
least, that he could not bear to feel that it might not be; but however
ardently and eagerly he might try to believe it, there was always the
dark alternative that pain might not be either remedial or educative;
there was the terrible p