ortant than Views.
Very often one adopts a View only to express one's belief in an
Institution.... Men can do with almost all sorts of Views, but only with
certain Institutions. All this Doubt doesn't touch a truth like that.
One does not refuse to live in a house because of the old symbols one
finds upon the door.... If they _are_ old symbols...."

Out of such private contemplations he would descend suddenly upon me.

"What are _you_ going to do with your life, Steve?" he would ask.

"There is no happiness in life without some form of service. Where do
you mean to serve? With your bent for science and natural history, it
wouldn't be difficult for you to get into the I.C.S. I doubt if you'd do
anything at the law; it's a rough game, Steve, though the prizes are
big. Big prizes the lawyers get. I've known a man in the Privy Council
under forty--and that without anything much in the way of a family....
But always one must concentrate. The one thing England will not stand is
a loafer, a wool-gatherer, a man who goes about musing and half-awake.
It's our energy. We're western. It's that has made us all we are."

I knew whither that pointed. Never so far as I can remember did Mr.
Siddons criticize either myself or my father directly, but I understood
with the utmost clearness that he found my father indolent and
hesitating, and myself more than a little bit of a mollycoddle, and in
urgent need of pulling together.

Sec. 6

Harbury went on with that process of suppressing, encrusting, hardening,
and bracing-up which Mr. Siddons had begun. For a time I pulled myself
together very thoroughly. I am not ungrateful nor unfaithful to Harbury;
in your turn you will go there, you will have to live your life in this
British world of ours and you must learn its language and manners,
acquire its reserves and develop the approved toughness and patterning
of cuticle. Afterwards if you please you may quarrel with it. But don't
when the time comes quarrel with the present conditions of human
association and think it is only with Harbury you quarrel. What man has
become and may become beneath the masks and impositions of civilization,
in his intimate texture and in the depths of his being, I begin now in
my middle age to appreciate. No longer is he an instinctive savage but a
creature of almost incredible variability and wonderful new
possibilities. Marvels undreamt of, power still inconceivable, an empire
beyond the uttermost stars;