To give place to nothing very satisfactory.  It was not a mere coincidence that Sidney was going through a period of mental and moral confusion just in those years which brought Clara Hewett from childhood to the state of woman.  Among the acquaintances of Sidney’s boyhood there was not one but had a chosen female companion from the age of fifteen or earlier; he himself had been no exception to the rule in his class, but at the time of meeting with Hewett he was companionless, and remained so.  The Hewetts became his closest friends; in their brief prosperity he rejoiced with them, in their hardships he gave them all the assistance to which John’s pride would consent; his name was never spoken among them but with warmth and gratitude.  And of course the day came to which Hewett had looked forward—­the day when Sidney could no longer take Clara upon his knee and stroke her brown hair and joke with her about her fits of good and ill humour.  Sidney knew well enough what was in his friend’s mind, and, though with no sense of constraint, he felt that this handsome, keen-eyed, capricious girl was destined to be his wife.  He liked Clara; she always attracted him and interested him; but her faults were too obvious to escape any eye, and the older she grew, the more was he impressed and troubled by them.  The thought of Clara became a preoccupation, and with the love which at length he recognised there blended a sense of fate fulfilling itself.  His enthusiasms, his purposes, never defined as education would have defined them, were dissipated into utter vagueness.  He lost his guiding interests, and found himself returning to those of boyhood.  The country once more attracted him; he took out his old sketch-books, bought a new one, revived the regret that he could not be a painter of landscape.  A visit to one or two picture-galleries, and then again profound discouragement, recognition of the fact that he was a mechanic and never could be anything else.

It was the end of his illusions.  For him not even passionate love was to preserve the power of idealising its object.  He loved Clara with all the desire of his being, but could no longer deceive himself in judging her character.  The same sad clearness of vision affected his judgment of the world about him, of the activities in which he had once been zealous, of the conditions which enveloped his life and the lives of those dear to him.  The spirit of revolt often enough stirred within him, but no longer found utterance in the speech which brings relief; he did his best to dispel the mood, mocking at it as folly.  Consciously he set himself the task of becoming a practical man, of learning to make the best of life as he found it, of shunning as the fatal error that habit of mind which kept John Hewett on the rack.  Who was he that he should look for pleasant things in his course through the world?  ’We are the lower orders; we are the working classes,’ he said bitterly to his friend, and that seemed the final answer to all his aspirations.