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his emotions: an accidental kindness touched him so much
that sometimes he did not venture to speak in order not to
betray the unsteadiness of his voice. He remembered the bit-
terness of his life at school, the humiliation which he had
endured, the banter which had made him morbidly afraid
of making himself ridiculous; and he remembered the lone-
liness he had felt since, faced with the world, the disillusion
and the disappointment caused by the difference between
what it promised to his active imagination and what it gave.
But notwithstanding he was able to look at himself from the
outside and smile with amusement.
‘By Jove, if I weren’t flippant, I should hang myself,’ he
thought cheerfully.
His mind went back to the answer he had given his un-
cle when he asked him what he had learnt in Paris. He had
learnt a good deal more than he told him. A conversation
with Cronshaw had stuck in his memory, and one phrase
he had used, a commonplace one enough, had set his brain
working.
‘My dear fellow,’ Cronshaw said, ‘there’s no such thing as
abstract morality.’
When Philip ceased to believe in Christianity he felt that
a great weight was taken from his shoulders; casting off the
responsibility which weighed down every action, when ev-
ery action was infinitely important for the welfare of his
immortal soul, he experienced a vivid sense of liberty. But
he knew now that this was an illusion. When he put away the
religion in which he had been brought up, he had kept unim-
paired the morality which was part and parcel of it. He made

1 Of Human Bondage