But I found to my great content that whatever change had passed over the spirits of my companions, they had at least lost no fibre of their individuality.  The change that had passed over them was like the change that passes over a young man, who has lived at the University among dilettante literary designs and mild sociological theorising, when he finds himself plunged into the urgent practical activities of the world.  Our happiness was the happiness which comes of intense toil, with no fatigue to dog it, and from a consciousness of the vital issues which we were pursuing.  But my companions had still intellectual faults and preferences, self-confidence, critical intolerance, boisterousness, wilfulness.  Stranger still, I found coldness, anger, jealousy, still at work.  Of course in the latter case reconciliation was easier, both in the light of common enthusiasm and, still more, because mental communication was so much swifter and easier than it had been on earth.  There was no need of those protracted talks, those tiresome explanations which clever people, who really love and esteem each other, fall into on earth—­the statements which affirm nothing, the explanations which elucidate nothing, because of the intricacies of human speech and the fact that people use the same words with such different implications and meanings.  All those became unnecessary, because one could pierce instantaneously into the very essence of the soul, and manifest, without the need of expression, the regard and affection which lay beneath the cross-currents of emotion.  But love and affection waxed and waned in heaven as on earth; it was weakened and it was transferred.  Few souls are so serene on earth as to see with perfect equanimity a friend, whom one loves and trusts, becoming absorbed in some new and exciting emotion, which may not perhaps obliterate the original regard, but which must withdraw from it for a time the energy which fed the flame of the intermitted relation.

It was very strange to me to realise the fact that friendships and intimacies were formed as on earth, and that they lost their freshness, either from some lack of real congeniality or from some divergence of development.  Sometimes, I may add, our teachers were consulted by the aggrieved, sometimes they even intervened unasked.

I will freely confess that this all immensely heightened the interests to me of our common life.  One could see two spirits drawn together by some secret tie of emotion, and one could see some further influence strike across and suspend it.  One case of this I will mention, which is typical of many.  There came among us an extremely lively and rather whimsical spirit, more like a boy than a man.  I wondered at first why he was chosen for this work, because he seemed both fitful and even capricious; but I gradually realised in him an extraordinary fineness of perception, and a swiftness of intuition almost unrivalled.  He had a power of weighing almost by instinct the constituent elements of character, which seemed to me something like the power of tonality in a musician, the gift of recognising, by pure faculty, what any notes may be, however confusedly jangled on an instrument.  It was wonderful to me how often his instantaneous judgments proved more sagacious than our carefully formed conclusions.