The regimen was very disagreeable to his English habits, and the
tedium of the place was great. His mother thought it quite enough to
account for his captiousness, and the doctor said it was recovery,
but no one guessed how much was due to the good resolutions he had
made on the moraine and ratified with Cecil. To no one else had he
spoken, but all the more for his reserve did he feel himself bound by
the sense of the shame and dishonour of falling back from vows made
in the time of danger. No one else was aware of it, but John Lucas
Brownlow was not of a character to treat a promise or a resolution
lightly. If he could have got out of his head the continual echo of
the two lines about the monastic intentions of a certain personage
when sick, he would have been infinitely better tempered.
For to poor Jock steadiness appeared renunciation of all "jest and
youthful jollity," and religion seemed tedious endurance of what
might be important, but, like everything important, was to him very
wearisome and uninteresting. To him all zest and pleasure in life
seemed extinguished, and he would have preferred leaving Eton, where
he must change his habits and amaze his associates. Indeed, he was
between hoping and fearing that all this would there seem folly.
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