have the key, if any, to your heart—be absolutely ignorant of it.
'He looks a little tired and worn: he has been sitting up late;' 'all
young men are melancholy: leave him alone and he will be better in a
year or two,' was all that was said when I was actually meditating
suicide—when I believe I was on the brink of insanity."

All these extracts are from letters to myself at different periods.
Taking them together, and thus arranged, my case seems irresistible;
still I must concede that it is all theory—all inference: I do not
wholly know the facts, and never shall.




CHAPTER IV


I found the first hint that occurs to indicate the lines of his later
life, in a letter to his father, written in his last week at
Cambridge. In the Classical Tripos Arthur contrived to secure a
second; in the translations, notably Greek, we heard he did as well
as anybody; but history and other detailed subjects dragged him down:
it was an extraordinarily unequal performance.

His father, being ambitious for his sons, and knowing to a certain
extent Arthur's ability, was altogether a good deal disappointed. He
had accepted Arthur's failure to get a scholarship or exhibition, not
with equanimity, but with a resolute silence, knowing that strict
scholarship was not his son's strong point, but still hoping that he
would at least do well enough in his Tripos to give him a possibility