John stopped aghast at the sorrow he was causing, and he looked at his mother.  She did not speak.  Her ears were full of merciless ruins; hope vanished in the white dust; and the house with its memories sacred and sweet fell pitilessly:  beams lying this way and that, the piece of exposed wall with the well-known wall paper, the crashing of slates.  How they fall!  John’s heart was rent with grief, but he could not stay his determination any more than his breath.  Youth is a season of suffering, we cannot surrender our desire, and it lies heavy and burning on our hearts.  It is so easy for age, so hard for youth to make sacrifices.  Youth is and must be wholly, madly selfish; it is not until we have learnt the folly of our aims that we may forget them, that we may pity the sufferings of others, that we may rejoice in the triumphs of our friends.  To the superficial therefore, John Norton will appear but the incarnation of egotism and priggishness, but those who see deeper will have recognised that he is one who has suffered bitterly, as bitterly as the outcast who lies dead in his rags beneath the light of the policeman’s lantern.  Mental and physical wants!—­he who may know one may not know the other:  is not the absence of one the reason of the other?  Mental and physical wants! the two planes of suffering whence the great divisions of mankind view and envy the other’s destinies, as we view a passing pageant, as those who stand on the decks of crossing ships gaze regretfully back.

Those who have suffered much physical want will never understand John Norton; he will find commiseration only from those who have realised a priori the worthlessness of existence, the vileness of life; above all, from those who, conscious of a sense of life’s degradation, impetuously desire their ideal—­the immeasurable ideal which lies before them, clear, heavenly, and crystalline; the sea into which they would plunge their souls, but in whose benedictive waters they may only dip their fingertips, and crossing themselves, pass up the aisle of human tribulation.  We suffer in proportion to our passions.  But John Norton had no passion, say they who see passion only in carnal dissipation.  Yet the passions of the spirit are more terrible than those of the flesh; the passion for God, the passion of revolt against the humbleness of life; and there is no peace until passion of whatever kind has wailed itself out.

Foolish are they who describe youth as a time of happiness; it is one of fever and anguish.

Beneath its apparent calm, there was never a stormier youth than John’s.  The boy’s heart that grieves to death for a chorus-girl, the little clerk who mourns to madness for the bright life that flashes from the point of sight of his high office stool, never felt more keenly the nervous pain of desire and the lassitudes of resistance.  You think John Norton did not suffer in his imperious desire to pull down the home of his fathers and build a monastery!