his having apparently never dreamt of any stretch of the point of
liberal allowance, of so-called adventure, on behalf of "development,"
never dreamt of any stretch but that of the imagination itself indeed--
quite a different matter and even if it too were at moments to recoil;
it was so true that the general measure of his world as to what it might
be prompt and pleasant and in the day's work or the day's play to "go in
for" was exactly the range that tinged all his education as liberal, the
education the free design of which he had left so short a way behind him
when he died.

Just there was the luck attendant of the coincidence of his course with
the moment at which the proceeding hither and yon to the tune of almost
any "happy thought," and in the interest of almost any branch of culture
or invocation of response that might be more easily improvised than not,
could positively strike the observer as excessive, as in fact absurd,
for the formation of taste or the enrichment of genius, unless the
principle of these values had in a particular connection been subjected
in advance to some challenge or some test. Why should it take such a
flood of suggestion, such a luxury of acquaintance and contact, only to
make superficial specimens? Why shouldn't the art of living inward a
little more, and thereby of digging a little deeper or pressing a little
further, rather modestly replace the enviable, always the enviable,
young Briton's enormous range of alternatives in the way of question-
begging movement, the way of vision and of non-vision, the enormous
habit of holidays? If one could have made out once for all that holidays
were proportionately and infallibly inspiring one would have ceased
thoughtfully to worry; but the question was as it stood an old story,
even though it might freshly radiate, on occasion, under the recognition
that the seed-smothered patch of soil flowered, when it did flower, with
a fragrance all its own. This concomitant, however, always dangled, that