CHAPTER XXVI.
THIRD PILGRIMAGE TO HOUND STREET Like water, human character will find its level; and Nature, with her way of fitting men to their environment, had made young Martin Stone what Stephen called a "Sanitist." There had been nothing else for her to do with him.
This young man had come into the social scheme at a moment when the conception of existence as a present life corrected by a life to come, was tottering; and the conception of the world as an upper-class preserve somewhat seriously disturbed.
Losing his father and mother at an early age, and brought up till he was fourteen by Mr.Stone, he had formed the habit of thinking for himself.
This had rendered him unpopular, and added force to the essential single-heartedness transmitted to him through his grandfather.

A particular aversion to the sights and scenes of suffering, which had caused him as a child to object to killing flies, and to watching rabbits caught in traps, had been regulated by his training as a doctor.

His fleshly horror of pain and ugliness was now disciplined, his spiritual dislike of them forced into a philosophy.

The peculiar chaos surrounding all young men who live in large towns and think at all, had made him gradually reject all abstract speculation; but a certain fire of aspiration coming, we may suppose, through Mr.Stone, had nevertheless impelled him to embrace something with all his might.

He had therefore embraced health.