look regretfully
out to sea; perhaps the day may come when I may strike into it ...
believe in it always if you can; I do not say it is vanity ... the
shock blinded me; I can not see if I would."

And again--

"Moral wounds never heal; they may be torn open by a chance word, by
a fragment of print, by a sentence from a letter; and there we have
to sit with pale face and shuddering heart, to bleed in silence and
dissemble it. Then, too, there is that constant dismal feeling which
the Greeks called [Greek: upoulos]: the horrible conviction, the grim
memory lurking deep down, perhaps almost out of sight, thrust away by
circumstance and action, but always ready to rise noiselessly up and
draw you to itself."

"'A good life, and therefore a happy one,' says my old aunt, writing
to me this morning; it is marvellous and yet sustaining what one can
pass through, and yet those about you--those who suppose that they
have the key, if any, to your heart--be absolutely ignorant of it.
'He looks a little tired and worn: he has been sitting up late;' 'all
young men are melancholy: leave him alone and he will be better in a
year or two,' was all that was said when I was actually meditating
suicide--when I believe I was on the brink of insanity."

All these extracts are from letters to myself at different periods.
Taking them together, and thus arranged, my case seems irresistible;
still I must concede that it is all theory--all inference: I do not
wholly know the facts, and never shall.

CHAPTER IV

I found the first hint that occurs to indicate the lines of his later
life, in a letter to his father, written in his last week at
Cambridge. In the Classical Tripos Arthur contrived to secure a
second; in the translations, notably Greek, we heard he did as well
as anybody; but history and other detailed subjects dragged him down:
it was an extraordinarily unequal performance.

His father, being ambitious for his sons, and knowing to a certain
extent Arthur's ability, was altogether a good deal disappointed. He
had accepted Arthur's failure to get a scholarship or exhibition, not
with equanimity, but with a resolute silence, knowing that strict
scholarship was not his son's strong point, but still hoping that he
would at least do well enough in his Tripos to give him a possibility
of a Fellowship.

Arthur would himself have been happier with a Fellowship than with
any other position, but the possibility did not stimulate