Meanwhile, however, his health suffered; less, indeed, through the severity of the noviciate, which was not lacking in physical recreation, than from within. The subtlety and acumen characteristic of the educational system of which he was now the object met his own natural tendencies halfway. He spent all his days and a good share of his nights in intellectual exercises, in searchings of the conscience, in contemplation, in introspection, into which he flung himself with such a passion of contentiousness as to involve him in a thousand difficulties, contradictions, and controversies. He was the despair⁠—if at the same time the greatest hope⁠—of his tutors, whom he daily pushed to the limits of their endurance by his raging dialectic and the subtility of his mental processes. “ Ad hoec quid tu? ” he would ask, the glasses of his spectacles flashing. And the cornered Father could only admonish him to pray for a tranquil spirit⁠—“ ut in aliquem gradum quietis in anima perveniat.