Meanwhile you need have no fears, I think, in leading your normal, probationary life. You have the opportunity of University education before you. And that, at any rate, can do you no harm, and will probably be of extreme use to you, whatever your ultimate decision. You want to find out the truth, to impart the truth, and to help your fellow-men to lead better lives. Very well then, if there's a God, Tom, as you and I believe, you must be just the material that He would most greatly care to use. So why not leave it at that for a little while? Want to do the right thing, and so do the next one; and you'll find, I think, that the precise nature of your own particular right thing, evangelist or engineer, will pretty certainly settle itself. Your aff. father, P. H. XIII _To Hugh Pontrex, Villa Rosa, Mentone._ c/o DR. ROBERT LYNN, APPLEBROOK, DEVON, _May_ 3, 1910. MY DEAR HUGH, I have just come back to read your letter from one of those super-days of which even the happiest life can contain, I imagine, no more than a handful. Of merely good days I can remember many enough--a sufficient number, at any rate, to absorb very happily the memory of their less favoured brethren. And several of them remain distinct by virtue of some outstanding incident or emotion that they contained or inspired. But most, I think, have become blended into a general peaceable impression of past contentment. To use a popular Americanism, they were good times, and usually real good times at that. But of these super-days, these Olympians among mundane experiences, no man can expect very many, and I have been, I suspect, as fortunate as most--in any case so fortunate as to be more than grateful, notwithstanding the tiny, struggling sense in me (a legacy of superstition, I suppose, from some far-back ancestors) that so exquisite an enjoyment must surely prelude some equivalent disaster. They are not, as a rule, I think, critical days, at any rate in the ordinarily accepted sense of the term, though I can remember perhaps a couple that in a small fashion might answer this description.