This £3,700 odd I have always devoted to the upkeep of the place, which is therefore in first-rate order.  The rest I live on, or save.

These arrangements, with the beautifying and furnishing of the house and the restoration of the church in memory of my father, occupied and amused me for a year or so, but when they were finished time began to hang heavy on my hands.  What was the use of possessing about £20,000 a year when there was nothing upon which it could be spent?  For after all my own wants were few and simple and the acquisition of valuable pictures and costly furniture is limited by space.  Oh! in my small way I was like the weary King Ecclesiast.  For I too made me great works and had possessions of great and small cattle (I tried farming and lost money over it!) and gathered me silver and gold and the peculiar treasure of kings, which I presume means whatever a man in authority chiefly desires, and so forth.  But “behold all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.”

So, notwithstanding my wealth and health and the deference which is the rich man’s portion, especially when the limit of his riches is not known, it came about that I too “hated life,” and this when I was not much over thirty.  I did not know what to do; for Society as the word is generally understood, I had no taste; it bored me; horse-racing and cards I loathed, who had already gambled too much on a big scale.  The killing of creatures under the name of sport palled upon me, indeed I began to doubt if it were right, while the office of a junior county magistrate in a place where there was no crime, only occupied me an hour or two a month.

Lastly my neighbours were few and with all due deference to them, extremely dull.  At least I could not understand them because in them there did not seem to be anything to understand, and I am quite certain that they did not understand me.  More, when they came to learn that I was radical in my views and had written certain “dreadful” and somewhat socialistic books in the form of fiction, they both feared and mistrusted me as an enemy to their particular section of the race.  As I had not married and showed no inclination to do so, their womenkind also, out of their intimate knowledge, proclaimed that I led an immoral life, though a little reflection would have shown them that there was no one in the neighbourhood which for a time I seldom left, who could possibly have tempted an educated creature to such courses.

Terrible is the lot of a man who, while still young and possessing the intellect necessary to achievement, is deprived of all ambition.  And I had none at all.  I did not even wish to purchase a peerage or a baronetcy in this fashion or in that, and, as in my father’s case, my tastes were so many and so catholic that I could not lose myself in any one of them.  They never became more than diversions to me.  A hobby is only really amusing when it becomes an obsession.