Hugh's idea of mental progress, in his later years, was the slow dwelling upon some thought, the quiet application of it to other thoughts. It seemed an inversion of the ordinary method of progress, if the biographies that he read were true. Taking the case, for instance, of the particular man whom Hugh had known, and whose biography he had studied, he seemed in youth to have been generous, fearless, candid, and ardent, and life must have been to him a process of hardening and encrusting with prejudice; he seemed to have begun with a bright faith in ideas, and to have ended with a dull belief in organisations. He had begun by being thrilled with the beauty of virtue, and he had ended by supporting the G.F.S. Hugh's experience was the exact opposite of this. He had begun, he thought, by being loaded and burdened with prejudices and stupid notions, acquired he knew not how; he had not doubted the value of authority, tradition, usage; as life went on, it seemed to him that he had got rid of his prejudices one by one, and that he had arrived, at the age of forty, at valuing sincerity, sympathy, simplicity, and candour, above dogma and accumulated beliefs. He had begun with a firm faith in systems and institutions; he had ended by basing all his hopes on the individual. He had begun by looking for beauty and perfection wherever he was told to expect it; if he had not discerned it, he had blamed his own dulness of perception. It had been a heavy and soulless business; and the real freshness of life, intellectual curiosity, mental independence, seemed to have come to him in fullest measure, just at the age when most men seemed to have parted with those qualities. As an undergraduate, he had been more aware of fitfulness and weariness than anything; only gradually had he become conscious of concentration, sustained zest, intention. Then he had tended to condemn enthusiasm as a species of defective manners. Now he lived by its steady light. Then he had been at the mercy of a new idea, an attractive personality. He shuddered to think how easily he had made friendships, and how contemptuously he had broken them the moment he was disappointed. Now he weighed and tested more; but at the same time he also opened his heart and his thoughts far more deliberately and frankly to sympathetic and generous people. Hugh seemed to have found rather than to have lost his youth. His actual youth, indeed, seemed to him to have been a tremulous and listless thing, full of fears and sensibilities, feminine, unbalanced, frivolous. Life had so far been to Hugh pure gain. Looking back he saw himself irresolute, vague, sentimental, incapable of application, unmethodical, half-hearted. He had had none of the buoyancy, the splendid dreams, the sparkling ambitions that seemed, according to the records, to have been the stuff of great men's youth.