The charm of the Cambridge life was to Hugh the alternation of society and solitude. He was soon fortunate enough to obtain a post at his old college, and to be allotted a set of rooms there. He was sociably enough inclined, and the stir and movement of the minute society was interesting and enlivening. He had a little definite work to do, and he tried to cultivate relations with every one in the college. It was pleasant that he had no connection with disciplinary matters; and thus he was able to enter into a friendly intercourse with the undergraduates, not checked or hampered by any necessity to find fault or to offer advice. He occupied his rooms during term-time, and lived the life of the college with quiet enjoyment. But he retained his little house as well, and when the vacation began, he retired there, and spent his days much in solitude. He preferred this indeed to the life of the college, but he was well aware that it owed half its pleasure to its being an interlude in the busier life. But it was thus that what he felt were his best thoughts came to him; thoughts, that is to say, that pierced below the surface, and had a quality of reality which his mind, when he was employed and full of schemes, often seemed to himself to lack. But, like all speculative people who spend much time in solitary thought, he seemed to himself very soon to cross the debateable ground in which people of definite religious views appeared to him to linger gladly. Here he left behind all the persons who depended upon systems. Here remained Roman Catholics, who depended chiefly upon the authority and tradition of the Church, and Protestants, depending no less blindly and complacently upon the authority of the Bible. The real and crucial difficulty lay further on; and it was simply this: he saw a world full of joy, and full too of suffering; sometimes one of his fellow-pilgrims would be stricken down with some incurable malady, and through slow gradations of pain, sink wretchedly to death; was this suffering remedial, educative, benevolent? He hoped it was, he believed that it was, in the sense, at least, that he could not bear to feel that it might not be; but however ardently and eagerly he might try to believe it, there was always the dark alternative that pain might not be either remedial or educative; there was the terrible possibility that identity and personal consciousness were absolutely extinguished by death; for there was no sort of evidence to the contrary; and if this was the case, what remained of all human belief, philosophies, and creeds? They might simply be beautiful dreams, adorable mistakes, exquisite fallacies: but they could supply no inspiration for life, unless there was an element of absolute certainty about them, which was just the element that they lacked; and, in any case, the sad fact that such certainties as men professed differed from and even contradicted each other, introduced a new bewilderment upon the scene.