a
cloud upon the path, and would melt into the sunlit air at last.

Hugh used to feel half amused at the irrepressible sense of youth which
thrilled him still. As a boy, he had little suspected that the serious
elderly men, of settled habits and close-shaved chins, had any such
thoughts as these under their battered exteriors. He had thought that
such persons were necessarily stolid and comfortable persons, believing
in committees and correspondence, fond of food and drink, careful of
their balance at the bank, and rather disgusted at than tolerant of the
irrepressible levity and flightiness of youth. Yet now that he himself
was approaching middle age, he was conscious, not indeed of increased
levity or high spirits, but of undiminished vigour, wider sympathy,
larger joy. Life was not only not less interesting, but it seemed
rather to thrill and pulsate with fresh and delightful emotion. If he
could not taste it with the same insouciance, it was only because he
perceived its quality more poignantly. If life were less full of
laughter, it was only because there were sweeter and more joyful things
to enjoy. What was best of all about this later delight, was that it
left no bitter taste behind it; in youth, a day of abandonment to
elation, a day of breezy talk, hearty laughter, active pleasure, would
often leave a sense of flatness and dissatisfaction behind it; but the
later joy had no sort of weariness as its shadow; it left one
invigorated and hopeful.

The most marked difference of all was in one's relations with others.
In youth a new friendship had been a kind of excited capture; it had
been shadowed by jealousy; it had been a desire for possession. One
had not been content unless one had been sure that one's friend had the
same sort of unique regard that one experienced oneself. One had
resented his other friendships, and wished to supersede them. But now
Hugh had no such feeling. He had no desire to make a relationship,
because the relationship seemed already there. If one met a
sympathetic and congenial person, one made, as it were, a sort of
sunlit excursion in a new and pleasing country. One admired the
prospects, surveyed the contours. In old days, one had desired to
establish a kind of fortress in the centre, and claim the fruitful land
for one's own.

Of course, in Hugh's dealings with the youthful persons whom he
encountered in his Cambridge life, he became aware of the existence of
the sub