ng across life and
interrupting its habitual current, contradicting rather than confirming
their previous experience.

Hugh was himself rather on the feminine side: though he had a strong
practical turn, and could carry through a matter effectively enough,
yet he valued delicate and sincere emotions, disinterestedness,
simplicity, and loyalty, above practical activity and organisation; the
result of this, he supposed, was that he tended, from a sense of the
refreshment of contrast, to make his friends rather among men than
among women, and this was, he believed, the reason why he had never
fallen frankly in love, because he could to a great extent supply out
of his own nature the elements which as a rule men sought among women;
and because the complexity and sensitiveness of his own temperament
took refuge rather in tranquillity and straight-forward commonsense.
As he grew older, as he became absorbed more and more in literary work,
he tended, he thought, to draw more and more away from human
relationships; the energy, the interest, that had formerly gone into
making new relationships now began to run in a narrower channel.
Whether it was prudent to yield to this impulse he did not stop to
inquire. It seemed to him that many of his friends wasted a great deal
of force and activity from semi-prudential motives. As his life became
more solitary, an old friend once took him to task on this point. He
said that it was all very well for a time, but that Hugh would find his
interest in his work flag, and that there would be nothing to fill the
gap. He advised him, at the cost of some inconvenience, to cultivate
relations with a wider circle, to go to social gatherings, to make
acquaintances. He knew, he said, that Hugh would possibly find it
rather tiresome, but it was of the nature of an investment which might
some day prove of value.

Hugh replied that he thought that this was living life too much on the
principle of the White Knight in _Through the Looking-Glass_. The
White Knight kept a mouse-trap slung to his saddle; when it was
objected that he would not be likely to find mice on the back of his
horse, he replied that perhaps it was not likely, but that if they were
there, he did not choose to have them running about. Hugh confessed
that he did find ordinary society tiresome; but to persist in
frequenting it, on the chance that some day it would turn out to be a
method of filling up vacant hours, seemed to him t