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THE WINDOWfigure of his wife reading stories to the littleboy; filled his pipe. He turned from the sight ofhuman ignorance and human fate and the seaeating the ground we stand on, which, had hebeen able to contemplate it fixedly might haveled to something; and found consolation intrifles so slight compared with the august themejust now before him that he was disposed to slurthat comfort over, to deprecate it, as if to becaught happy in a world of misery was for anhonest man the most despicable of crimes. Itwas true; he was for the most part happy; he hadhis wife; he had his children; he had promisedin six weeks’ time to talk “some nonsense" tothe young men of Cardiff about Locke, Hume,Berkeley, and the causes of the French Revolu-tion. But this and his pleasure in it, in thephrases he made, in the ardour of youth, in hiswife’s beauty, in the tributes that reached himfrom Swansea, Cardiff, Exeter, Southampton,Kidderminster, Oxford, Cambridge—all had tobe deprecated and concealed under the phrase"talking nonsense,” because, in effect, he hadnot done the thing he might have done. It wasa disguise; it was the refuge of a man afraidto own his own feelings, who could not say,This is what I like—this is what I am; and ratherpitiable and distasteful to William Bankes and73