is aesthetic education. But through it all, a
vivid little picture was continually coming before his mind's eye--of a
sneakish person manipulating a slide.

No human being had witnessed the act, and he was cocksure that no higher
power existed to see, it; but for all that it worried him. Memories are
not dead things but alive; they dwindle in disuse, but they harden and
develop in all sorts of queer ways if they are being continually fretted.
Curiously enough, though at the time he perceived clearly that the
shifting was accidental, as the days wore on, his memory became confused
about it, until at last he was not sure--although he assured himself that
he _was_ sure--whether the movement had been absolutely involuntary.
Then it is possible that Hill's dietary was conducive to morbid
conscientiousness; a breakfast frequently eaten in a hurry, a midday bun,
and, at such hours after five as chanced to be convenient, such meat as
his means determined, usually in a chop-house in a back street off the
Brompton Road. Occasionally he treated himself to threepenny or ninepenny
classics, and they usually represented a suppression of potatoes or chops.
It is indisputable that outbreaks of self-abasement and emotional revival
have a distinct relation to periods of scarcity. But apart from this
influence on the feelings, there was in Hill a distinct aversion to
falsity that the blasphemous Landport cobbler had inculcated by strap and
tongue from his earliest years. Of one fact about professed atheists I am
convinced; they may be--they usually are--fools, void of subtlety,
revilers of holy institutions, brutal speakers, and mischievous knaves,
but they lie with difficulty. If it were not so, if they had the faintest
grasp of the idea of compromise, they would simply be liberal churchmen.
And, moreover, this memory poisoned his regard for Miss Haysman. For she
now so evidently preferred him to Wedderburn that he felt sure he cared
for her, and began reciprocating her attentions by timid marks of personal
regard; at one time he even bought a bunch of violets, carried it about in
his pocket, and produced it, with a stumbling explanation, withered and
dead, in the gallery of old iron. It poisoned, too, the denunciation of
capitalist dishonesty that had been one of his life's pleasures. And,
lastly, it poisoned his triumph in Wedderburn. Previously he had been
Wedderburn's superior in his own eyes, and had raged simply at a want of
recogni