h and too long absorbed; that their
tasks and responsibilities long ago rose about them like a flood, and have
kept them swimming with sturdy stroke the years through, their eyes level
with the troubled surface--no horizon in sight, no passing fleets, no
comrades but those who struggle in the flood like themselves. If they be
frivolous, lightheaded, men without purpose or achievement, we may
conjecture, if we do not know, that they were born so, or spoiled by
fortune, or befuddled by self-indulgence. It is no great matter what we
think of them.

It is enough to know that there are some laws which govern a man's
awakening to know himself and the right part to play. A man _is_ the part
he plays among his fellows. He is not isolated; he cannot be. His life is
made up of the relations he bears to others--is made or marred by those
relations, guided by them, judged by them, expressed in them. There is
nothing else upon which he can spend his spirit--nothing else that we can
see. It is by these he gets his spiritual growth; it is by these we see his
character revealed, his purpose, and his gifts. Some play with a certain
natural passion, an unstudied directness, without grace, without
modulation, with no study of the masters or consciousness of the pervading
spirit of the plot; others give all their thought to their costume and
think only of the audience; a few act as those who have mastered the
secrets of a serious art, with deliberate subordination of themselves to
the great end and motive of the play, spending themselves like good
servants, indulging no wilfulness, obtruding no eccentricity, lending heart
and tone and gesture to the perfect progress of the action. These have
"found themselves," and have all the ease of a perfect adjustment.

Adjustment is exactly what a man gains when he comes to himself. Some men
gain it late, some early; some get it all at once, as if by one distinct
act of deliberate accommodation; others get it by degrees and quite
imperceptibly. No doubt to most men it comes by the slow processes of
experience--at each stage of life a little. A college man feels the first
shock of it at graduation, when the boy's life has been lived out and the
man's life suddenly begins. He has measured himself with boys, he knows
their code and feels the spur of their ideals of achievement. But what the
world expects of him he has yet to find out, and it works, when he has
discovered it, a veritable revolution in hi