lining the following verses in Shelley's Julian and Maddalo:
And solitary places; where we taste
The pleasure of believing what we see
Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be."
He found he was getting a surfeit of books, a surfeit of discussion. His daily habits became more haphazard. He took longer walks into the suburbs. He fraternized with irresponsible students and returned the glances of still more irresponsible young women. One of these, Lottchen, upon whose favours he was believed to have an option that amounted to a proprietary right, gave him, through a chance remark, a clue to his state of mind. She had asked about his plans for the future, and he had replied half-heartedly that he would probably return to the sea. "Oh," she exclaimed, "you must look a perfect darling in uniform!"
He had a bantering smile for her femininity, and while Lottchen assured him she adored everything that wore a uniform, "even the messenger-boys," his mind wandered on to its own circuitous conclusions. All life was an effort to effect some satisfactory reconciliation between uniformity and one's complex individualism. For all women, and most men, uniformity was an end in itself. For him most varieties of human uniformity ignored or did violence to his passion for self-development, for the broadest sympathy and comprehension. In "that untravelled world" of which he was for ever catching glimpses that lured him on, was a sublime sort of uniformity for which, more and more ardently, he thirsted.
He knew Vienna held nothing further for him. He was not at all reconciled to the thought of a career on
