was a gesture which his
friends both knew and loved.

He learned to adapt himself to persons of very various natures, and
indeed was so eager to meet people on their own ground that it seems to
me he was to a certain extent misapprehended. I have seen a good many
things said about him since his death which seem to me to be entire
misinterpretations of him, arising from the simple fact that they were
reflections of his companion's mood mirrored in his own sympathetic
mind. Further, I am sure that what was something very like patient and
courteous boredom in him, when he was confronted with some sentimental
and egotistical character, was interpretated as a sad and remote
unworldliness. Someone writing of him spoke of his abstracted and
far-off mood, with his eyes indwelling in a rapture of hallowed thought.
This seems to me wholly unlike Hugh. He was far more likely to have been
considering how he could get away to something which interested him
more.

Hugh's was really a very fresh and sparkling nature, never insipid,
intent from morning to night on a vital enjoyment of life in all its
aspects. I do not mean that he was always wanting to be amused--it was
very far from that. Amusement was the spring of his social mood; but he
had a passion too for silence and solitude. His devotions were eagerly
and rapturously practised; then he turned to his work. "Writing seems to
me now the only thing worth doing in the world," he says in one of his
letters when he was deep in a book. Then he flung himself into gardening
and handicraft, back again to his writings, or his correspondence, and
again to his prayers.

But it is impossible to select one of his moods, and to say that his
true life lay there. His life lay in all of them. If work was tedious to
him, he comforted himself with the thought that it would soon be done.
He was an excellent man of affairs, never "slothful in business," but
with great practical ability. He made careful bargains for his books,
and looked after his financial interests tenaciously and diligently,
with a definite purpose always in his mind. He lived, I am sure, always
looking forward and anticipating. I do not believe he dwelt at all upon
the past. It was life in which he was interested. As I walked with my
mother about the beautiful garden, after his funeral, I said to her: "It
seems almost too pathetic to be borne that Hugh should just have
completed all this." "Yes," she said, "but I am sure we ou