tle barrier which is erected between youth and middle age; he
was conscious often that the delightful egotism of youth has, as a
rule, very little deference for, or interest in, the opinions of older
persons. Youth is so profoundly absorbed in its own visions, that it
is very rarely curious about the duller reveries of older people. It
regards them as necessarily dreary, grey, wise, and prudent. The only
thing it values is sympathy for itself, just as a child is far more
interested in the few chords which it can strum on a piano than in the
richest performance of a maestro. But Hugh did not find this to be
disagreeable, because he was less and less concerned about the effect
he produced. He had found out that the joys of perception are at least
equal to the joys of expression. Youth cannot wait, it must utter its
half-formed wishes, put out its crude fruits; and it used to seem to
Hugh that one of the most pathetic and beautiful things in the world
was the intensity of feeling, the limitless dreams, that rose shadowily
in a boy's mind side by side with the inarticulateness, the failure to
command any medium of expression. One of the reasons why young and
clever men are so desperately anxious to be amusing and humorous, is
because they desire above all things to see the effect of their words,
and long to convulse an audience; while they lack, as a rule, the
practised delicacy, the finished economy in which humour, to be
effective, must be clothed.

But, after all, what brought Hugh the best comfort, was the discovery
that advancing years did not bring with them any lack of sensitiveness,
any dreariness, any sense of dulness. It was indeed rather the
reverse. The whole fabric of life was richer, more impassioned, more
desirable than he had ever supposed. In youth, emotion and feeling had
seemed to him like oases in a desert, oases which one had to quit, when
one crossed the threshold of life, to plod wearily among endless sands.
But now he had found that the desert had a life, an emotion, a beauty
of its own, and the oases of youthful fancy seemed to be tame and
limited by comparison. Hugh still thought with a shudder of old age,
which lay ahead of him; but even as he shuddered, he began to wonder
whether that too would not open up to him a whole range of experiences
and emotions, of which to-day he had no inkling at all. Would life
perhaps seem richer still? That was what he dared to hope. Meanwhile
he woul