universal tendency in all human institutions to thicken and clog, to work loosely and badly, to rust and weaken towards catastrophes, came from the young—­the crude unmerciful young.  It seemed in those days to thoughtful men the harsh law of being—­that either we must submit to our elders and be stifled, or disregard them, disobey them, thrust them aside, and make our little step of progress before we too ossified and became obstructive in our turn.

My pushing past my mother, my irresponsive departure to my own silent meditations, was, I now perceive, a figure of the whole hard relationship between parents and son in those days.  There appeared no other way; that perpetually recurring tragedy was, it seemed, part of the very nature of the progress of the world.  We did not think then that minds might grow ripe without growing rigid, or children honor their parents and still think for themselves.  We were angry and hasty because we stifled in the darkness, in a poisoned and vitiated air.  That deliberate animation of the intelligence which is now the universal quality, that vigor with consideration, that judgment with confident enterprise which shine through all our world, were things disintegrated and unknown in the corrupting atmosphere of our former state.

(So the first fascicle ended.  I put it aside and looked for the second.

“Well?” said the man who wrote.

“This is fiction?”

“It’s my story.”

“But you—­ Amidst this beauty—­ You are not this ill-conditioned, squalidly bred lad of whom I have been reading?”

He smiled.  “There intervenes a certain Change,” he said.  “Have I not hinted at that?”

I hesitated upon a question, then saw the second fascicle at hand, and picked it up.)

CHAPTER THE SECOND

NETTIE

Section 1

I cannot now remember (the story resumed), what interval separated that evening on which Parload first showed me the comet—­I think I only pretended to see it then—­and the Sunday afternoon I spent at Checkshill.

Between the two there was time enough for me to give notice and leave Rawdon’s, to seek for some other situation very strenuously in vain, to think and say many hard and violent things to my mother and to Parload, and to pass through some phases of very profound wretchedness.  There must have been a passionate correspondence with Nettie, but all the froth and fury of that has faded now out of my memory.  All I have clear now is that I wrote one magnificent farewell to her, casting her off forever, and that I got in reply a prim little note to say, that even if there was to be an end to everything, that was no excuse for writing such things as I had done, and then I think I wrote again in a vein I considered satirical.  To that she did not reply.  That interval was at least three weeks, and probably four, because the