that trying land between vague hope and definite attainment, 1 had
become very much sobered in my desire for a degree, and was already
beginning to emerge from that rose-colored mist with which the dream
of youth so readily envelops the future.
Whatever may have been the perils of self-tradition, I certainly did
not escape them, for it required eight years —from the time I left
Rockford in the summer of 1881 until Hull-House was opened in the
autumn of 1889 —to formulate my convictions even in the least satisfactory manner, much less to reduce them to a plan for action. During
most of that time I was absolutely at sea so far as any moral purpose was
concerned, clinging only to the desire to live in a really living world
and refusing to he content with a shadowy intellectual or aesthetic reflection of it.