that every carelessness brought its swift
revenge. He had previously felt little or no sympathy with invalids;
he had disliked the signs of illness in others, the languor, the sunken
eye, the fretfulness of fever, and now he had to bear them himself. He
had always felt, half unconsciously, that illness was a fanciful thing,
and might be avoided by a kind of cheerful effort. But now he had to
go through the experience of feebleness and peevish inactivity. He
used sometimes, out of pure irritability, to resume his work; but he
had no grip or vigour; his conceptions were languid, his technical
resources were dulled; and then came strange and unmanning dizzinesses,
the horrible feeling, in the middle of a cheerful company, that one is
hardly accountable for one's actions, when the only escape seems to be
to hold on with all one's might to the slenderest thread of
conventional thought. The difficulty was to know how to fill the time.
There was no relish in company, and yet a hatred of solitude; he used
to moon about, sit in the garden, take irresolute walks; he read
novels, and found them unutterably dreary. Music was the only thing
that lifted him out of his causeless depression, and gave back a little
zest to life; but the fear that was almost intolerable was the
possibility that he would never emerge out of this wretchedness. Day
after day passed, and no change was apparent; till just when he was on
the verge of despair, when the darkest visions began to haunt his mind,
the cloud began to lift. He found that he could work a little, though
the smallest excess was still punished by days of feebleness. But,
holding to this thread of hope, Hugh climbed slowly out of the
darkness; and it was a day to him of deep and abiding gratitude when,
after a long Swiss holiday, in which his bodily activity had come back
to him with an intensity of pleasure, Hugh realised that he was again
in his ordinary health.

But he had at this time a bitter disappointment. Just before his
father's death he had finished preparing a little work for publication,
a set of essays on a variety of subjects, to which he had devoted much
care and thought. To his deep vexation it met with a very contemptuous
reception. Its errors were mercilessly criticised, and it was
proclaimed to be the work of a sickly, sentimental dilettante. Hugh
found it hard to believe in the verdict; but his conviction was
established by the opinion of one of his old fr