re coldly
contemptuous in their manner, and it seemed to him that even Dr.
Henry was less friendly. He became desperately anxious to get out of a
position which he found more intolerable than the original isolation. He
applied himself with extreme diligence to his studies, even affecting
an interest, unnatural for the most pious, in the expositions given
by learned doctors of the Thirty-nine Articles. At lectures on Church
history he made notes about the vagaries of heretics so assiduously that
the professor began to hope that there existed one student at least
who took an interest in the Christological controversies of the sixth
century. He never ventured back again to the Wednesday prayer-meeting,
but he performed many attendances beyond the required minimum at the
college chapel. Morning after morning he dragged himself from his
bed and hurried across the dusky quadrangle to take his part in the
mutilated matins with which the college authorities see fit to usher
in the day. He even went to hear the sermons delivered on Friday
afternoons, homilies so painful that the preachers themselves recognise
an extraordinary merit in enduring them, and allow that submission of
the ears to one of them is to be reckoned as equal to two ordinary acts
of devotion.

It is to be hoped that Hyacinth derived some remote benefit from the
discipline to which he subjected himself, for the immediate results were
not satisfactory. He seemed no nearer winning the respect of the more
serious students, and Dr. Henry's manner showed no signs of softening
into friendliness. His surfeit of theology bred in him a dislike of the
subject. The solemn platitudes which were posed as expositions of the
creeds affected his mind much as the expurgated life histories of maiden
aunts do the newly-emancipated school-girl. The relentless closing in of
argument upon a single previously settled doctrine woke in him a desire
to break through at some point and breathe again in the open. He
began to fear that he was becoming hopelessly irreligious. His morning
devotions in the foggy atmosphere of the chapel did not touch the
capacity for enthusiasm within him. The vague splendour of his father's
meditations had left him outside, indeed, but sure that within there
lay a great reality. But now religion had come to seem an altogether
narrower thing, a fenced off, well-ordered garden in which useful
vegetables might be cultivated, but very little inspiring to the soul