up a single night with him. If duty was disagreeable to him Clem paid homage to it afar off, but pleaded exemption. He admitted that waiting on the sick is obligatory on people who are fitted for it, and is very charming. Nothing was more beautiful to him than tender, filial care spending itself for a beloved object. But it was not his vocation. His nerves were more finely ordered than those of mankind generally, and the sight of disease and suffering distressed him too much. Everything was surrendered to him in the houses of his friends. If any inconvenience was to be endured, he was the first person to be protected from it, and he accepted the greatest sacrifices, with a graceful acknowledgment, it is true, but with no repulse. To what better purpose could the best wine be put than in cherishing his imagination. It was simple waste to allow it to be poured out upon the earth, and to give it to a fool was no better. After he succeeded so well in the world, Clem, to a great extent, deserted me, although I was his oldest friend and the friend of his childhood. I heard that he visited a good many rich persons, that he made much of them, and they made much of him. He kept up a kind of acquaintance with me, not by writing to me, but by the very cheap mode of sending me a newspaper now and then with a marked paragraph in it announcing the exploits of his school at a cricket-match, or occasionally with a report of a lecture which he had delivered. He was a decent orator, and from motives of business if from no other, he not unfrequently spoke in public. One or two of these lectures wounded me a good deal. There was one in particular on As You Like It, in which he held up to admiration the fidelity which is so remarkable in Shakespeare, and lamented that in these days it was so rare to find anything of the kind, he thought that we were becoming more indifferent to one another. He maintained, however, that man should be everything to man, and he then enlarged on the duty of really cultivating affection, of its superiority to books, and on the pleasure and profit of self-denial. I do not mean to accuse Clem of downright hypocrisy. I have known many persons come up from the country and go into raptures over a playhouse sun and moon who have never bestowed a glance or a thought on the real sun and moon to be seen from their own doors; and we are all aware it by no means follows because we are moved to our very depths by the spectacle of unrecognised, uncomplaining endurance in a novel, that therefore we can step over the road to waste an hour or a sixpence upon the unrecognised, uncomplaining endurance of the poor lone woman left a widow in the little villa there. I was annoyed with myself because Clem’s abandonment of me so much affected me. I wished I could cut the rope and carelessly cast him adrift as he had cast me adrift, but I could not. I never could make out and cannot make out what was the secret of his influence over me; why I was unable to say, “If you do not care for me I do not care for you.” I longed sometimes for complete rupture, so that we might know exactly where we were, but it never came. Gradually our intercourse grew thinner and thinner, until at last I heard that he had been spending a fortnight with some semi-aristocratic acquaintance within five miles of me, and during the whole of that time he never came near me. I met him in a railway station soon afterwards, when he came up to me effusive and apparently affectionate. “It was a real grief to me, my dear fellow,” he said, “that I could not call on you last month, but the truth was I was so driven: they would make me go here and go there, and I kept putting off my visit to you till it was too late.” Fortunately my train was just starting, or I don’t know what might have happened. I said not a word; shook hands with him; got into the carriage; he waved his hat to me, and I pretended not to see him, but I did see him, and saw him turn round immediately to some well-dressed officer-like gentleman with whom he walked laughing down the platform. The rest of that day was black to me. I cared for nothing. I passed away from the thought of Clem, and dwelt upon the conviction which had long possessed me that I was insignificant, that there was nothing much in me, and it was this which destroyed my peace. We may reconcile ourselves to poverty and suffering, but few of us can endure the conviction that there is nothing in us, and that consequently we cannot expect anybody to gravitate towards us with any forceful impulse. It is a bitter experience. And yet there is consolation. The universe is infinite. In the presence of its celestial magnitudes who is there who is really great or small, and what is the difference between you and me, my work and yours? I sought refuge in the idea of God, the God of a starry night with its incomprehensible distances; and I was at peace, content to be the meanest worm of all the millions that crawl on the earth.
IV
A Necessary Development
The few friends who have read the first part of my autobiography may perhaps remember that in my younger days I had engaged myself to a girl named Ellen, from whom afterwards I parted. After some two or three years she was left an orphan, and came into the possession of a
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