future anxieties, matter to him? He had his work, his
place, his liberty, and what further could he need?

His liberty! How good that was! He might go and come as he would,
unquestioned, unblamed. He thought with a pitying horror of what his
life had previously been--the tangle of small engagements, the silly
routine work, in which no one believed; they had all been bound on a
kind of make-believe pilgrimage, carrying burdens round and round, and
putting them down where they had taken them up.

He determined that, whatever happened, he would do no more work in
which he did not believe, that he would say what he felt, not what
traditional formulas required him to say. Work! he believed in that
with all his heart, so long as it had an end, an object. To wrestle
with the comprehension of some difficult matter, there were few
pleasures like that! but it must have been an advance, when it was
over; one must feel that one was stronger, more clear-minded, more
alert, more sincere; one must not feel that one was only more weary,
more dissatisfied. His path was clear before him at all events.

Plans and schemes began to rise in Hugh's brain he felt as if he was
delivered from the brooding sway of some evil and melancholy spirit.
How strange was the power that physical conditions had upon the very
stuff of the mind! Half-an-hour ago the grievances, the self-pity, the
dissatisfaction had appeared to him to be real and tangible troubles;
not indeed things which it was wise to brood over, but inevitable
pains, to be borne with such philosophy as was attainable. But now
they seemed as unreal, as untrue, as painful dreams, from which one
wakes with a sharp and great relief.

What remained with Hugh was the sense of one of the dangers of the
solitary life--the over-influence, the preponderance of sentiment. The
only serenity was to be found in claiming and expecting nothing, but in
welcoming what came as a gift, as an added joy, to which one had indeed
no right; but which fell like the sunshine and the rain; one must be
ready to help, to work, to use one's strength at whatever point it
could be best applied, and to look for no reward. This was what
poisoned life, the claim to be paid in the coin that pleased one best.
Payment indeed was made largely; and the blessed thing was that if one
was not paid fully for one's efforts, neither was one paid relentlessly
for one's mistakes.

And then, as to the deeper shadows of the