Edited by Charles Aldarondo (aldarondo@yahoo.com)

George Gissing

A Life's Morning





CHAPTER I

AN UNDERGRADUATE AT LEISURE




Wilfrid Athel went down invalided a few days after the beginning of
Trinity term. The event was not unanticipated. At Christmas it had been
clear enough that he was overtaxing himself; his father remarked on the
fact with anxiety, and urged moderation, his own peculiar virtue.
Wilfrid, whose battle with circumstances was all before him, declined to
believe that the body was anything but the very humble servant of the
will. So the body took its revenge.

He had been delicate in childhood, and the stage of hardy naturalism
which interposes itself between tender juvenility and the birth of
self-consciousness did not in his case last long enough to establish his
frame in the vigour to which it was tending. There was nothing sickly
about him; it was only an excess of nervous vitality that would not