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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