others was so facile a thing with Hugh, that he saw that his failure in the matter was a deplorable and a miserable thing. He was singularly and even richly equipped for the pursuit of friendship; while his very sensitiveness, his inherent epicureanism, which made advance so easy, made progress impossible. And yet he realised that it was useless to deplore this; that no amount of desire for the larger and deeper experience would make him capable of sustaining its pains and penalties. He saw that he was condemned to pass through life, a smiling and courteous spectator of beauty and delight; but that, through a real and vital deficiency of soul, he could have no share in the inner and holier mysteries. XX Limitations--Sympathy--A Quiet Choice--The Mind of God--Intuition Hitherto it had seemed to Hugh that life was a struggle to escape from himself, from that haunting personality which, like a shadow, dogged and imitated his movements, but all with a sombre blackness, a species of business-like sadness of gesture, doing heavily and mechanically what he himself did with such blitheness and joy. Again and again that self seemed to thwart, to hinder, to check him. There were days, it seemed to him, when a conflict was waged, an unequal conflict, between that outer and that inner self. Days when the inner spirit was intense, alert, eager, and when the outer self was languid, dreary, mockingly sedate and indolent. Again there were days, and these were the saddest of all, when the inner spirit seemed to Hugh to be tranquil, high-minded, and strong; when that outer self was malign, turbulent, and headstrong, and when all the resolution and vigour he possessed, appeared to be wasted, not in following the higher aims and imaginings with a patient purpose, but in curbing and reining the rough and coltish nature that seemed so sadly yoked with his own. He felt on those days like a wearied and fretful charioteer, driving through a scene of rich and moving beauty, on which he would fain feast his eyes and heart, but compelled to an incessant watchfulness, a despairing strain, in watching and guiding his refractory, his spiteful steeds. The control he had never forfeited wholly. Perhaps his sensitiveness, his solitariness, his fastidiousness, had tended to keep his sensuous nature within bounds.