cheat--for the American at his worst is no more and no less than that--
nor a sluggish disingenuous snob--as the Briton too often becomes--but
a proud, ambitious, clean-handed, and capable man.




VIII

THE CULTIVATION OF THE IMAGINATION


Sec. 1


In the closing years of the school period comes the dawn of the process
of adolescence, and the simple egotism, the egotistical affections of
the child begin to be troubled by new interests, new vague impulses,
and presently by a flood of as yet formless emotions. The race, the
species, is claiming the individual, endeavouring to secure the
individual for its greater ends. In the space of a few years the almost
sexless boy and girl have become consciously sexual, are troubled by
the still mysterious possibilities of love, are stirred to discontent
and adventure, are reaching out imaginatively or actively towards what
is at last the recommencement of things, the essential fact in the
perennial reshaping of the order of the world. This is indeed something
of a second birth. At its beginning the child we have known begins to
recede, the new individuality gathers itself together with a sort of
shy jealousy, and withdraws from the confident intimacy of childhood
into a secret seclusion; all parents know of that loss; at its end we