One morning when he was sitting in his rooms at Cambridge, Hugh heard a knock at the door; there presently entered a clergyman, whom at first sight Hugh thought to be a stranger, but whom he almost immediately recognised as an old school-fellow, called Ralph Maitland, whom he had not seen for more than twenty years. Maitland had been an idle, good-humoured boy, full of ideas, a great reader and a voluble talker. Hugh had never known him particularly well; but he remembered to have heard that Maitland had fallen under religious impulses at Oxford, had become serious, had been ordained, and had eventually become a devoted and hard-working clergyman in a northern manufacturing town. He had been lately threatened with a break-down in health, and had been ordered abroad; he had come to Cambridge to see some friends, and hearing that Hugh was in residence there, had called upon him. Hugh was very much interested to see him, and gradually began to discern the smooth-faced boy he had known, under the worn and hard-featured mask of the priest. They spent most of that day together, and went out for a long walk. Hugh thought he perceived a touch of fanaticism about Maitland, who found it difficult to talk except on matters connected with his parish. But eventually he began to talk of the religious life, and Hugh gradually perceived that Maitland held a very ardent and almost fierce view of the priestly vocation; he drew a picture of the joys of mortification and self-denial, which impressed Hugh, partly because of its intensity, and partly also from an uneasy sense of strain and self-consciousness which it gave him. Maitland's idea seemed to be that all impulses, except the religious impulse in its narrowest sense, needed to be sternly repressed; that the highest life was a severe detachment from all earthly things; that the Christian pilgrim marched along a very narrow way, bristling with pitfalls both of opinion and practice; that the way was defined, hazily by Scripture and precisely by the Church, along which the believer must advance; "Few there be that find it!" said Maitland, with a kind of menacing joy. He was full of the errors of other sects and communions. The Roman doctrine was over-developed, not primitive enough; the Protestant nonconformists were neglectful of ecclesiastical ordinances. The only people, it seemed, who were in the right path were a small band of rather rigid Anglicans, who appeared to Maitland to be the precise type of humanity that Christ had desired to develop.