it was a very slow process; the world was bound with
innumerable heavy chains. There was much cruelty, stupidity,
selfishness, meanness abroad; all those ugly things decreased very
slowly, if indeed they decreased at all. Yet there seemed, too, to be
a species of development at work. But the real mystery lay in the fact
that, while our hopes and intuitions pointed to there being a great and
glorious scheme in the background, our reason and experience alike
tended to contradict that hope. How little one changed as the years
went on! How ineradicable our faults seemed! how ineffectual our
efforts! God indeed seemed to implant in us a wish to improve, and
then very often seemed steadily and deliberately to thwart that wish.

And then, too, how difficult it seemed really to draw near to other
people; in what a terrible isolation one's life was spent; even in the
midst of a cheerful and merry company, how the secrets of one's heart
hung like an invisible veil between us and our dearest and nearest.
The most one could hope for was to be a pleasant and kindly influence
in the lives of other people, and, when one was gone, one might live a
little while in their memories. The fact that some few healthily
organised people contrived to live simply and straightforwardly in the
activities of the moment, without questioning or speculating on the
causes of things, did not make things simpler for those on whom these
questions hourly and daily pressed. The people whom one accounted
best, did indeed spend their time in helping the happiness of others;
but did one perhaps only tend to think them so, because they ministered
to one's own contentment?

The only conclusion for Hugh seemed to be this: that one must have a
work to be faithfully and resolutely fulfilled; and that, outside of
that, one must live tenderly, simply, and kindly, adding so far as one
might to the happiness of others; and that one might resolutely eschew
all the busy multiplication of activities, which produced such scanty
results, and were indeed mainly originated in order that so-called
active people might feel themselves to be righteously employed.

XXVII

Progress--Country Life--Sustained Happiness--The Twilight

One hot still summer day Hugh went far afield, and struck into a little
piece of country that was new to him. He seemed to discern from the
map that it must have once been a large, low island almost entirely
surrounded by marshes; an