The Y.M.C.A. hadn’t developed in those early days to its present manifold excellence. There was no gymnasium. The only place one had was one’s bed in the barrack room on which one could read or write, not alone, because there was always a shouting incoming and outgoing crowd and cross fire of elementary jokes and horseplay. It seemed that there was never a chance of being alone, of escaping from this “lewd and licentious soldiery.” There were times when the desert island called irresistibly in this eternal isolation of mind but not of body. All that one had left behind, even the times when one was bored and out of temper, because perhaps one was off one’s drive at the Royal and Ancient, or some other trivial thing like that, became so glorious in one’s mind that the feel of the barrack blanket was an agony. Had one _ever_ been bored in that other life? Had one been touchy and said sarcastic things that were meant to hurt? Could it be possible that there was anything in that other world for which one wouldn’t barter one’s soul now? How little one had realised, appreciated, the good things of that life! One accepted them as a matter of course, as a matter of right. Now in the barrack-room introspections their real value stood out in the limelight of contrast and one saw oneself for the first time: a rather selfish, indifferent person, thoughtless, hurrying along the road of life with no point of view of one’s own, doing things because everybody else did them, accepting help carelessly, not realising that other people might need one’s help in return, content with a somewhat shallow secondhand philosophy because untried in the fire of reality. This was reality, this barrack life. This was the first time one had been up against facts, the first time it was a personal conflict between life and oneself with no mother or family to fend off the unpleasant; a fact that one hadn’t attempted to grasp. The picture of oneself was not comforting. To find out the truth about oneself is always like taking a pill without its sugar coating; and it was doubly bitter in those surroundings. Hitherto one had never been forced to do the unpleasant. One simply avoided it. Now one had to go on doing it day after day without a hope of escape, without any more alleviation than a very occasional week-end leave. Those week-ends were like a mouthful of water to Dives in the flames of hell,--but which made the flames all the fiercer afterwards! One prayed for them and loathed them.