Some men gain it late, some early; some get it all at once, as if by
one distinct act of deliberate accommodation; others get it by
degrees and quite imperceptibly. No doubt to most men it comes by
slow processes of experience--at each stage of life a little. A
college man feels the first shock of it at graduation, when the
boy's life has been lived out and the man's life suddenly begins.
He has measured himself with boys; he knows their code and feels the
spur of their ideals of achievement. But what the expects of him he
has yet to find out, and it works, when he has discovered, a
veritable revolution in his ways both of thought and of action. He
finds a new sort of fitness demanded of him, executive, thorough-
going, careful of details, full of drudgery and obedience to orders.
Everybody is ahead of him. Just now he was a senior, at the top of
the world he knows and reigned in, a finished product and pattern of
good form. Of a sudden he is a novice again, as green as in his
first school year, studying a thing that seems to have no rules--at
sea amid crosswinds, and a bit seasick withal. Presently, if he be
made of stuff that will shake into shape and fitness, he settles to
his tasks and is comfortable. He has come to himself: understands
what capacity is, and what it is meant for; sees that his training
was not for ornament or personal gratification, but to teach him how
to use himself and develop faculties worth using. Henceforth there
is a zest in action, and he loves to see his strokes tell.

The same thing happens to the lad come from the farm into the city,
a big and novel field, where crowds rush and jostle, and a rustic
boy must stand puzzled for a little how to use his placid and
unjaded strength. It happens, too, though in a deeper and more
subtle way, to the man who marries for love, if the love be true and
fit for foul weather. Mr. Bagehot used to say that a bachelor was