n hesitating to bring before his father
was concerned with that very grave interest of the young, his Object in
Life. It had nothing to do with those erotic disturbances that had
distressed his father's imagination. Whatever was going on below the
surface of Hugh's smiling or thoughtful presence in that respect had
still to come to the surface and find expression. But he was bothered
very much by divergent strands in his own intellectual composition. Two
sets of interests pulled at him, one--it will seem a dry interest to
many readers, but for Hugh it glittered and fascinated--was
crystallography and molecular physics; the other was caricature. Both
aptitudes sprang no doubt from the same exceptional sensitiveness to
form. As a schoolboy he exercised both very happily, but now he was
getting to the age of specialisation, and he was fluctuating very much
between science and art. After a spell of scientific study he would come
upon a fatigue period and find nothing in life but absurdities and a
lark that one could represent very amusingly; after a bout of funny
drawings his mind went back to his light and crystals and films like a
Magdalen repenting in a church. After his public school he had refused
Cambridge and gone to University College, London, to work under the
great and inspiring Professor Cardinal; simultaneously Cardinal had been
arranging to go to Cambridge, and Hugh had scarcely embarked upon his
London work when Cardinal was succeeded by the dull, conscientious and
depressing Pelkingham, at whose touch crystals became as puddings,
bubble films like cotton sheets, transparency vanished from the world,
and X rays dwarfed and died. And Hugh degenerated immediately into a
scoffing trifler who wished to give up science for art.

He gave up science for art after grave consultation with his father, and
the real trouble that had been fretting him, it seemed, was that now he
repented and wanted to follow Cardinal to Cambridge, and--a year
lost--go on with science again. He felt it was a discreditable
fluctuation; he knew it would be a considerable expense; and so he took
two weeks before he could screw himself up to broaching the matter.

"So _that_ is all," said Mr. Britling, immensely relieved.

"My dear Parent, you didn't think I had backed a bill or forged a
cheque?"

"I thought you might have married a chorus girl or something of that
sort," said Mr. Britling.

"Or bought a large cream-coloured motor-car for