me way as other people. The love of parents for their children is the
only emotion which is quite disinterested. Among strangers he had grown up
as best he could, but he had seldom been used with patience or
forbearance. He prided himself on his self-control. It had been whipped
into him by the mockery of his fellows. Then they called him cynical and
callous. He had acquired calmness of demeanour and under most
circumstances an unruffled exterior, so that now he could not show his
feelings. People told him he was unemotional; but he knew that he was at
the mercy of his emotions: an accidental kindness touched him so much that
sometimes he did not venture to speak in order not to betray the
unsteadiness of his voice. He remembered the bitterness of his life at
school, the humiliation which he had endured, the banter which had made
him morbidly afraid of making himself ridiculous; and he remembered the
loneliness he had felt since, faced with the world, the disillusion and
the disappointment caused by the difference between what it promised to
his active imagination and what it gave. But notwithstanding he was able
to look at himself from the outside and smile with amusement.

"By Jove, if I weren't flippant, I should hang myself," he thought
cheerfully.

His mind went back to the answer he had given his uncle when he asked him
what he had learnt in Paris. He had learnt a good deal more than he told
him. A conversation with Cronshaw had stuck in his memory, and one phrase
he had used, a commonplace one enough, had set his brain working.

"My dear fellow," Cronshaw said, "there's no such thing as abstract
morality."

When Philip ceased to believe in Christianity he felt that a great weight
was taken from his shoulders; casting off the responsibility which weighed
down every action, when every action was infinitely important for the
welfare of his immortal soul, he experienced a vivid sense of liberty. But
he knew now that this was an illusion. When he put away the religion in
which he had been brought up, he had kept unimpaired the morality which
was part and parcel of it. He made up his mind therefore to think things
out for himself. He determined to be swayed by no prejudices. He swept
away the virtues and the vices, the established laws of good and evil,
with the idea of finding out the rules of life for himself. He did not
know whether rules were necessary at all. That was one of the things he
wanted to discover. Cl