ing that he must soon make
haste to begone and leave his place for others. There was a sense of
romance and pathos about it all; and the scenes thus unfolded suddenly
before his eyes were dear to him because they had been dear to others,
and stood for so much old tenderness and anxious love. There was
always, too, a feeling in his mind of how easy, how sweet and tranquil,
life would be under such conditions. Seen from outside, certain lives,
lived in beautiful surroundings and tinged with seemly traditions,
seemed to have a romantic quality, even in their sufferings and
sorrows. No amount of experience, no accumulation of the certainty
that life was interwoven with a sordid and dreary fibre, seemed ever to
dispel this illusion, just as sorrows and miseries depicted in a book
or in a drama appeared to have a romance about them which, seen from
inside, they lacked. There were in Hugh's own memory a few places and
a few houses, where by some happy fortune the hours had always been
touched with this poetical quality, and into which no touch of
dreariness had ever entered. Something of the same romance lingered
for Hugh over certain of the colleges at Cambridge. To wander through
their courts, to read the mysterious names inscribed over unknown
doors, to think of the long succession of inmates, grave or
light-hearted, that lived within, either for a happy space of youth, or
through long quiet years; this never ceased to communicate to him a
certain thrill of emotion.

The only period of his life that seemed to Hugh to lack this quality of
poetry were the years of his official life in London, the years that
the locust had eaten. He did not grudge having spent them so, for they
had given a sort of solidity and gravity to life; but now that he was
free to live as he chose, he determined that he would, if he could, so
spend his days, that there should be as little as possible of this dull
and ugly quality intermixed with them; the sadness and incompleteness
of countless lives seemed to Hugh to arise from the fact that so many
men settled down to mechanical toil, which first robbed them of their
freshness, and then routine became essential to them. But Hugh
determined that neither his work nor his occupation should have this
sunless and dismal quality; that he would deliberately eschew the
things that brought him dreariness, and the people who took a mean and
conventional view; that he would not take up, in a spirit of h