But Maurice Guest had a more tenacious hold on life.

The home in which he grew up, was one of those cheerless, middle-class
homes, across which never passes a breath of the great gladness, the
ideal beauty of life; where thought never swings itself above the
material interests of the day gone, the day to come, and existence
grows as timid and trivial as the petty griefs and pleasures that
intersperse it. The days drip past, one by one, like water from a
spout after a rain-shower; and the dull monotony of them benumbs all
wholesome temerity at its core. Maurice Guest had known days of this
kind. For before the irksomeness of the school-bench was well behind
him, he had begun his training as a teacher, and as soon as he had
learnt how to instil his own half-digested knowledge into the minds of
others, he received a small post in the school at which his father
taught. The latter had, for some time, secretly cherished a wish to
send the boy to study at the neighbouring university, to make a
scholar of his eldest son; but the longer he waited, the more
unfavourable did circumstances seem, and the idea finally died before
it was born.

Maurice Guest looked back on the four years he had just come through,
with bitterness; and it was only later, when he was engrossed heart
and soul in congenial work, that he began to recognise, and be vaguely
grateful for, the spirit of order with which they had familiarised
him. At first, he could not recall them without an aversion that was
almost physical: this machine-like regularity, which, in its disregard
of mood and feeling, had something of a divine callousness to human
stirrings; the jarring contact with automaton-like people; his
inadequacy and distaste for a task that grew day by day more painful.
His own knowledge was so hesitating, so uncertain, too slight for