an's life are
wasted and which are fruitful. It is not necessarily the days in which
a man gives himself up to his chosen work in which he makes most
progress. Sometimes a long inarticulate period, when there seems to a
man to be a dearth of ideas, a mental drought, acts as a sort of
incubation in which a thought is slowly conceived and perfected.
Sometimes a long period of repression stores force at high pressure.
The lean years are often the prelude, even the cause, of the years of
fatness, when the exhausted and overteemed earth has lain fallow and
still, storing its vital juices.

Sometimes, too, a disagreeable duty, undertaken in heaviness and
faithfully fulfilled, rewards one by an increase of mental strength and
agility. A painful experience which seems to drown a man's whole
nature in depression and sadness, to cloud hope and eagerness alike,
can be seen in retrospect to have been a period fertile in patience and
courage.

Hugh did not find his official life depressing, but very much the
reverse. He enjoyed dealing with affairs and with men. He used
sometimes to wonder, half regretfully, half comfortably, at the fading
of his old dreams, in which so much that was beautiful was mingled with
so much that was uneasy. He began indeed to be somewhat impatient of
sentiment and emotion, and to think with a sort of compassion of those
who allowed themselves to be ruled by such motives. He did not exactly
adopt a conventional standard, but he found it easier to live on a
conventional plane, until he even began to be viewed by some of his old
friends as a man who had adopted a conventional view. Hugh indeed
found, in his official life, that the majority of those among whom his
lot was cast, did seem whole-heartedly content to live in a
conventional world and to enjoy conventional successes. Such men, and
they were numerous, never seemed disposed to probe beneath the surface
of things, unless they were confronted by adverse circumstances,
bereavements, or indifferent health; and, under these conditions, their
one aim seemed to be to escape as soon as possible from the region of
discomfort: they viewed reflection as a sort of symptom of failing
vitality. And so Hugh drifted to a certain extent into feeling that
self-questioning and abstract thought were a species of intellectual
ill-health. One arrived at no solution, any more than one did in the
case of a toothache; the one thing to do was to get rid of the
u