espise myself. Why should you pity me? What is there to pity me
for? My troubles, such as I have, are my own making--every one.'

And he laid a sort of vindictive emphasis on the words. The tears of
excitement were in her eyes.

'Won't you let me be your friend?' she said, trembling, with a kind of
reproach. 'I thought--the other night--we were to be friends. Won't you
tell me--'

'--more of yourself?' her eyes said, but her voice failed her. And
as for him, as he gazed at her, all the accidents of circumstance, of
individual character, seemed to drop from her. He forgot the difference
of years; he saw her no longer as she was--a girl hardly out of the
schoolroom, vain, ambitious, dangerously responsive, on whose crude
romantic sense he was wantonly playing; she was to him pure beauty, pure
woman. For one tumultuous moment the cold, critical instinct which
had been for years draining his life of all its natural energies was
powerless. It was sweet to yield, to speak, as it had never been sweet
before.

So, leaning over the gate, he told her the story of his life, of his
cramped childhood and youth, of his brief moment of happiness and
success at college, of his first attempts to make himself a power among
younger men, of the gradual dismal failure of all his efforts, the dying
down of desire and ambition. From the general narrative there stood
out little pictures of individual persons or scenes, clear cut
and masterly--of his father, the Gainsborough churchwarden; of his
Methodistical mother, who had all her life lamented her own beauty as a
special snare of Satan, and who since her husband's death had refused to
see her son on the ground that his opinions 'had vexed his father;' of
his first ardent worship of knowledge, and passion to communicate
it; and of the first intuitions in lecture, face to face with an
undergraduate, alone in college rooms, sometimes alone on Alpine
heights, of something cold, impotent, and baffling in himself, which
was to stand for ever between him and action, between him and human
affection; the growth of the critical pessimist sense which laid the
axe to the root of enthusiasm after enthusiasm, friendship after
friendship--which made other men feel him inhuman, intangible, a
skeleton at the feast; and the persistence through it all of a kind of
hunger for life and its satisfactions, which the will was more and
more powerless to satisfy: all those Langham put into words with an
extraord