d, he is like a familiar and sympathetic guide on a mountain
peak. He helps one at the right point; his desire to push on or to stop
coincides with one's own; he is not a hired assistant, but a brotherly
comrade. On the day that I am thinking of I had just such a companion.
He was cheerful, accessible, good-humoured. He followed when I wanted
to lead, he led when I was glad to follow. He was not ashamed of
being unaffectedly emotional, and he was not vaporous or quixotically
sentimental. He did not want to argue, or to hunt an idea to death; and
we had the supreme delight of long silences, during which our thoughts
led us to the same point, the truest test that there is some subtle
electrical affinity at work, moving viewlessly between heart and brain.

What no doubt heightened the pleasure for me was that I had been passing
through a somewhat dreary period. Things had been going wrong, had tied
themselves into knots. Several people whose fortunes had been bound
up with my own had been acting perversely and unreasonably--at least I
chose to think so. My own work had come to a standstill. I had pushed
on perhaps too fast, and I had got into a bare sort of moorland tract of
life, and could not discern the path in the heather. There did not
seem any particular task for me to undertake; the people whom it was
my business to help, if I could, seemed unaccountably and aggravatingly
prosperous and independent. Not only did no one seem to want my opinion,
but I did not feel that I had any opinions worth delivering. Who
does not know the frame of mind? When life seems rather an objectless
business, and one is tempted just to let things slide; when energy
is depleted, and the springs of hope are low; when one feels like
the family in one of Mrs. Walford's books, who all go out to dinner
together, and of whom the only fact that is related is that "nobody
wanted them." So fared it with my soul.

But that morning, somehow, the delicious sense had returned, of its own
accord, of a beautiful quality in common things. I had sought it in vain
for weeks; it had behaved as a cat behaves, the perverse, soft, pretty,
indifferent creature. It had stared blankly at my beckoning hand; it had
gambolled away into the bushes when I strove to capture it, and looked
out at me when I desisted with innocent grey eyes; and now it had
suddenly returned uncalled, to caress me as though I had been a
long-lost friend, diligently and anxiously sought for i