* * * * *

My own news is almost impossible to tell, as everything is simply
bewildering: in about five years from now I shall know how I felt;
but at present I feel nothing but discomfort; I hate foreign
countries and foreign people, and am finding more every day how
hopelessly insular I am: because of course, under the
circumstances, this is the proper place for me to be: but it is a
kind of dentist's chair.

* * * * *

But he soon parted once and for all with his sense of isolation; while
the splendours of Rome, the sense of history and state and world-wide
dominion, profoundly impressed his imagination. He was deeply inspired,
too, by the sight of simple and and unashamed piety among the common
folk, which appeared to him to put the colder and more cautious religion
of England to shame. Perhaps he did not allow sufficiently for the
temperamental differences between the two nations, but at any rate he
was comforted and reassured.

I do not know much of his doings at this time; I was hard at work at
Windsor on the Queen's letters, and settling into a new life at
Cambridge; but I realised that he was building up happiness fast. One
little touch of his perennial humour comes back to my mind. He was
describing to me some ceremony performed by a very old and absent-minded
ecclesiastic, and how two priests stood behind him to see that he
omitted nothing, "With the look in their eyes," said Hugh, "that you
can see in the eyes of a terrier who is standing with ears pricked at
the mouth of a burrow, and a rabbit preparing to bolt from within."