m; fled on and on, through streets that grew ever vaguer
and more shadowy, till at last his feet would carry him no further: he
sank down, with a loud cry, sank down, down, down, and wakened to find
that he was sitting up in bed, clammy with fear, and that dawn was
stealing in at the sides of the window.

II.

In Maurice Guest, it might be said that the smouldering unrest of two
generations burst into flame. As a young man, his father, then a poor
teacher in a small provincial town, had been a prey to certain dreams
and wishes, which harmonised ill with the conditions of his life. When,
for example, on a mild night, he watched the moon scudding a silvery,
cloud-flaked sky; when white clouds sailed swiftly, and soft spring
breezes were hastening past; when, in a word, all things seemed to be
making for some place, unknown, afar-off, where he was not, then he,
too, was seized with a desire to be moving, to strap on a knapsack and
be gone, to wander through foreign countries, to see strange cities and
hear strange tongues, was unconsciously filled with the desire to
taste, lighthearted, irresponsible, the joys and experiences of the
WANDERJAHRE, before settling down to face the matter-of-factnesss of
life. And as the present continually pushed the realisation of his
dreams into the future, he satisfied the immediate thirst of his soul
by playing the flute, and by breathing into the thin, reedy tones he
drew from it, all that he dreamed of, but would never know. For he
presently came to a place in his life where two paths diverged, and he
was forced to make a choice between them. It was characteristic of the
man that he chose the way of least resistance, and having married, more
or less improvidently, he turned his back on the visions that had
haunted his youth: afterwards, the cares, great and small, that came in
the train of the years, drove them ever further into the background.
Want of sympathy in his home-life blunted the finer edges of his
nature; of a gentle and yielding disposition, he took on the
commonplace colour of his surroundings. After years of unhesitating
toil, it is true, the most pressing material needs died down, but the
dreams and ambitions had died, too, never to come again. And as it is
in the nature of things that no one is less lenient towards romantic
longings than he who has suffered disappointment in them, who has
failed to transmute them into reality, so, in this case, the son's
first