"This time it tells me that I am not equal to the direct
responsibility; that I can not, with my habits of mind and temper,
impress a permanent enough mark upon the lads. It is like beginning a
system of education that is to take, say, thirty years, giving them a
year of it, and then taking to another; you not only lose your year,
but you unfit them for other systems. That is what I should do; my
methods do not prepare them for other normal education; it is only
the beginning of a preparation for what I believe to be a higher and
more complete education, but that wouldn't justify my keeping on.

"I do not believe that I have done any harm; in fact, my theory would
forbid me to think so; but it also informs me that my _rôle_ is
not to be that of a schoolmaster.

"I shall be a poor man, of course; poor, that is, for an independent
gentleman. I wish I were a Fellow of a College at Cambridge; I would
try and be as ideal as Gray in that position."




CHAPTER V


In April he was released from his engagement, and he immediately went
abroad, alone. He travelled through Normandy into Brittany, spending
two months at a little village called Chanteuil, not far from the
Point du Sillon. Here he wandered about mostly alone, dressed in
the roughest possible costume, and allowing his beard to grow. "At