Page 193 - of-human-bondage-
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now.’
              Sometimes Hayward left Philip to go home by himself.
           He would never exactly reply to Philip’s eager questioning,
            but with a merry, rather stupid laugh, hinted at a romantic
            amour; he quoted a few lines of Rossetti, and once showed
           Philip  a  sonnet  in  which  passion  and  purple,  pessimism
            and pathos, were packed together on the subject of a young
            lady called Trude. Hayward surrounded his sordid and vul-
            gar little adventures with a glow of poetry, and thought he
           touched  hands  with  Pericles  and  Pheidias  because  to  de-
            scribe the object of his attentions he used the word hetaira
           instead of one of those, more blunt and apt, provided by
           the English language. Philip in the daytime had been led
            by curiosity to pass through the little street near the old
            bridge,  with  its  neat  white  houses  and  green  shutters,  in
           which according to Hayward the Fraulein Trude lived; but
           the women, with brutal faces and painted cheeks, who came
            out of their doors and cried out to him, filled him with fear;
            and he fled in horror from the rough hands that sought to
            detain him. He yearned above all things for experience and
           felt himself ridiculous because at his age he had not enjoyed
           that which all fiction taught him was the most important
           thing in life; but he had the unfortunate gift of seeing things
            as they were, and the reality which was offered him differed
           too terribly from the ideal of his dreams.
              He  did  not  know  how  wide  a  country,  arid  and  pre-
            cipitous, must be crossed before the traveller through life
            comes to an acceptance of reality. It is an illusion that youth
           is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young

           1                                   Of Human Bondage
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