she petted my
books, she knew about my certificates, she made fun of me in a way that
stirred my heart to her. Quite unconsciously I grew fond of her....

My adolescent years at Wimblehurst were on the whole laborious,
uneventful years that began in short jackets and left me in many ways
nearly a man, years so uneventful that the Calculus of Variations is
associated with one winter, and an examination in Physics for Science
and Art department Honours marks an epoch. Many divergent impulses
stirred within me, but the master impulse was a grave young disposition
to work and learn and thereby in some not very clearly defined way get
out of the Wimblehurst world into which I had fallen. I wrote with
some frequency to Ewart, self-conscious, but, as I remember them, not
intelligent letters, dated in Latin and with lapses into Latin quotation
that roused Ewart to parody. There was something about me in those days
more than a little priggish. But it was, to do myself justice, something
more than the petty pride of learning. I had a very grave sense of
discipline and preparation that I am not ashamed at all to remember. I
was serious. More serious than I am at the present time. More serious,
indeed, than any adult seems to be. I was capable then of efforts--of
nobilities.... They are beyond me now. I don't see why, at forty, I
shouldn't confess I respect my own youth. I had dropped being a boy
quite abruptly. I thought I was presently to go out into a larger and
quite important world and do significant things there. I thought I
was destined to do something definite to a world that had a definite
purpose. I did not understand then, as I do now, that life was to
consist largely in the world's doing things to me. Young people never
do seem to understand that aspect of things. And, as I say, among my
educational influences my uncle, all unsuspected, played a leading part,
and perhaps among other things gave my discontent with Wimblehurst, my
desire to get away from that clean and picturesque emptiness, a form and
expression that helped to emphasise it. In a way that definition made me
patient. "Presently I shall get to London," I said, echoing him.

I remember him now as talking, always talking, in those days. He talked
to me of theology, he talked of politics, of the wonders of science
and the marvels of art, of the passions and the affections, of
the immortality of the soul and the peculiar actions of drugs; but
predominantly and