o youthful freshness or
simplicity of heart; moreover, he exhibited precocious arrogance,
supported by an obstinacy which had not even the grace of quickening
into fieriness; he was often a braggart, and could not be trusted to
tell the truth where his self-esteem was ever so little concerned. How
unutterably the Harvey Rolfe of today despised himself at the age of
fifteen or so! Even at that amorphous age, a more loutish, ungainly boy
could scarcely have been found. Bashfulness cost him horrid torments,
of course exasperating his conceit. He hated girls; he scorned women.
Among his school-fellows he made a bad choice of comrades. Though
muscular and of tolerable health, he was physically, as well as
morally, a coward. Games and sports had I no attraction for him; he
shut himself up in rooms, and read a great deal, yet even this, it
seemed, not without an eye to winning admiration.

Brains he had--brains undeniably; but for a long time there was the
greatest doubt as to what use he could make of them. Harvey remembered
the day when it was settled that he should study medicine. He resolved
upon it merely because he had chanced to hear the Doctor say that he
was not cut out for _that_.

He saw himself at twenty, a lank, ungainly youth, with a disagreeable
complexion and a struggling moustache. He was a student at Guy's; he
had 'diggings'; he tasted the joy of independence. As is the way with
young men of turbid passions and indifferent breeding, he rapidly
signalised his independence by plunging into sordid slavery. A
miserable time to think of; a wilderness of riot, folly, and shame. Yet
it seemed to him that he was enjoying life. Among the rowdy set of his
fellow-students he shone with a certain superiority. His contempt of
money, and his large way of talking about it, conveyed the impression
that abundant means awaited him. He gave away coin as readily as he
spent it on himself; not so much in a true spirit of generosity (though
his character had gleams of it), as because he dreaded above all things
the appearance of niggardliness and the suspicion of a shallow purse.

Then came the memorable interview with his guardian on his twenty-first
birthday. Harvey flinched and grew hot in thinking of it. What an
ungrateful cur! What a self-sufficient young idiot! The Doctor had
borne so kindly with his follies and vices, had taken so much trouble
for his good, was it not the man's right and duty to speak grave words
of coun