He
was always ready to sympathise, to enter into any suggestion; he
suppressed himself and his own tastes completely and utterly; and he
found too, to his vast delight, that he could be entertaining and
amusing. The books he had read, the fiction with which he had crammed
himself, his keen eye for idiosyncrasies and absurdities, all came to
his assistance, and he was amply repaid by a smile for his trouble.

The two boys became inseparable, and perhaps the thing that made those
days of companionship bright with a singular and golden brightness, was
that there was in his friend the same fastidious vein, the same dislike
of any coarseness of talk or thought which was strong in Hugh. Looking
back on his school life, with all the surprising foulness of the talk
of even high-principled boys, it was a deep satisfaction to Hugh to
reflect that there had never been in the course of this friendship a
single hint, so far as he could recollect, in their own intercourse
with each other, of the existence of evil. They had tacitly ignored
it, and yet there had not been the least priggishness about the
relationship. They had never inquired about each other's aspirations
or virtues, in the style of sentimental school-books. They had never
said a word of religion, nor had there ever been the smallest
expression of sentiment. All that was taken for granted. It was
indeed one of those perfect, honest, wholesome companionships, which
can only exist between two cheerful boys of the same age. Hugh indeed
was conscious of a depth of sacred emotion, too sacred to be spoken of
to any one, even to be expressed to himself. It was not, in fact, a
definite relation which he represented to himself; it was rather like a
new light shed abroad over his life; incidents had a savour, a sharp
outline which they had lacked before. He became conscious, too, of the
movement and intermingling of personal forces, of characters. He no
longer had the purely spectatorial observation of others which had
distinguished him before, but beheld other personalities, as in a
mirror, in the mind of his friend. And then, too, what was a far
deeper joy, literature and poetry began to yield up their secrets to
him. Poetry had been to him before, a gracious, soulless thing like a
tree or a flower, and had been apprehended purely in its external
aspect. But now he suddenly saw the emotion that burnt beneath, not
indeed of the love that is mingled with desire--th