But he brought his successes more readily than he brought his troubles.  So far as he himself was concerned he was disposed to take a humorous view of the things that went wrong and didn’t come off with him, but as a “Tremendous Set-Down for the Proud Parent” they resisted humorous treatment....

Now the trouble that he had been hesitating to bring before his father was concerned with that very grave interest of the young, his Object in Life.  It had nothing to do with those erotic disturbances that had distressed his father’s imagination.  Whatever was going on below the surface of Hugh’s smiling or thoughtful presence in that respect had still to come to the surface and find expression.  But he was bothered very much by divergent strands in his own intellectual composition.  Two sets of interests pulled at him, one—­it will seem a dry interest to many readers, but for Hugh it glittered and fascinated—­was crystallography and molecular physics; the other was caricature.  Both aptitudes sprang no doubt from the same exceptional sensitiveness to form.  As a schoolboy he exercised both very happily, but now he was getting to the age of specialisation, and he was fluctuating very much between science and art.  After a spell of scientific study he would come upon a fatigue period and find nothing in life but absurdities and a lark that one could represent very amusingly; after a bout of funny drawings his mind went back to his light and crystals and films like a Magdalen repenting in a church.  After his public school he had refused Cambridge and gone to University College, London, to work under the great and inspiring Professor Cardinal; simultaneously Cardinal had been arranging to go to Cambridge, and Hugh had scarcely embarked upon his London work when Cardinal was succeeded by the dull, conscientious and depressing Pelkingham, at whose touch crystals became as puddings, bubble films like cotton sheets, transparency vanished from the world, and X rays dwarfed and died.  And Hugh degenerated immediately into a scoffing trifler who wished to give up science for art.

He gave up science for art after grave consultation with his father, and the real trouble that had been fretting him, it seemed, was that now he repented and wanted to follow Cardinal to Cambridge, and—­a year lost—­go on with science again.  He felt it was a discreditable fluctuation; he knew it would be a considerable expense; and so he took two weeks before he could screw himself up to broaching the matter.

“So that is all,” said Mr. Britling, immensely relieved.

“My dear Parent, you didn’t think I had backed a bill or forged a cheque?”

“I thought you might have married a chorus girl or something of that sort,” said Mr. Britling.

“Or bought a large cream-coloured motor-car for her on the instalment system, which she’d smashed up.  No, that sort of thing comes later....  I’ll just put myself down on the waiting list of one of those bits of delight in the Cambridge tobacco shops—­and go on with my studies for a year or two....”