rsity to deny.
Religion came to him in definite and traditional channels, and to seek
it in other directions appeared to him a species of wanton profanity.

The result was an entire divergence of thought, of which Hugh was fully
conscious; but it did not seem to him that there was anything to be
gained by candid avowal. He was at one with his father in the
essential doctrines of Christianity; and being by nature of a
speculative turn, he considered the discrimination of religious truth,
the criticism of religious tradition, to be rather a stimulating and
agreeable mental pastime than a question of ethics or morals. Thus he
was led into practising a kind of hypocrisy with his father in matters
of religion. He felt that it was not worth while engaging in argument
of a kind that would have distressed his father and irritated himself,
upon matters which he believed to be intellectual, while his father
believed them to be ethical. Hugh often pondered over this condition
of things, which he felt to be unsatisfactory, but no solution occurred
to him; he said to himself that he valued domestic peace rather than a
frank understanding upon matters to which he and his father attached a
wholly different value. But meantime he drifted further and further
away from the ecclesiastical attitude, though his fondness for
ecclesiastical art and ceremony effectually disguised from his father
the speculative movement of his mind.

But his independent entrance upon his professional life had given him
an emancipation of which he was not at first fully conscious. He did
not act from set purpose, and only became aware later that if he had
thought out a diplomatic scheme of action, he could not have devised a
more effectual one. He simply made his own arrangements for the
holidays; he travelled, he paid visits; he came home when it was
convenient to him; but the result was that in the early years of his
professional life he was very little at home. Hugh supposed afterwards
that his father must have felt this deeply; but he did not show it,
except that suddenly, almost in a day and an hour, Hugh became aware
that their relations had completely altered. He found himself met with
a deference, a courteous equality which he had never before
experienced. Instead of giving him advice, his father began to ask it,
and consulted him freely on matters which he had hitherto kept entirely
in his own hands. The result was at once an extraordinary