He was going to do well in the examinations, he knew; more or less mechanically he repeated over what his tutor had said, and some flattering words the Warden had written to his father--"We consider him one of our best men; he is certain to distinguish himself."
"But what's the good of it all?" he found himself asking. He looked up at the college buildings, dark about him, save for their squares of yellow windows. Gradually he began to wake out of his vacant reverie. What was the good of doing well?--why, it was an absurd question; of course, he wanted to do well, to win honour for himself and his College. He assured himself of this, in conventional phrases, but somehow, just then, he did not seem to care in the least for success like that, and honour. Yet here he had been, all this time, working for nothing else!
He was ashamed of this want of ambition, this deadness of desire. Of course, there were other things he cared for, he told himself, and to prove this he brought to mind the interests and pleasures of his ordinary life--his friendships, the ideas and books he believed in, his public speaking, the positions he held in various societies. But somehow all these seemed utterly foolish, futile, and unimportant. In desperation he began to think of simpler things--of boating, good clothes, and horses, and some riding boots he was having made. But everything, even the most universal pleasures of life, struck him now as tasteless and absurd. Why did people do such things, and what could they find in them to enjoy?
"But it's against common sense to feel this way!" he said to himself. He had always thought the disillusions of youth somewhat ridiculous, and often had made fun of the modern philosophy, or pseudo-philosophy, of disenchantment, with its literature of passion and despair. And now, as he sat there in the familiar quadrangle, with the rooms of his friends about him, all the people he knew so well, in there at the concert, he was uncomfortably aware of how absurd they would think it, should they know that he too had secretly begun, in the old, foolish, hackneyed way, to meditate on the nothingness of life. He of all people, who had always taken such sensible, commonplace views of things!