The Cathedral by Hugh Walpole

Falk Brandon was still, in reality, a boy. He, of course, did not know this and would have been very indignant had any one told him so; it was nevertheless the truth.

There is a kind of confidence of youth that has great charm, a sort of assumption of grown-up manners and worldly ways that is accompanied with an ingenuous belief in human nature, a naive trust in human goodness. One sees it sometimes in books, in stories that are like a charade acted by children dressed in their elders' clothes, and although these tales are nothing but fairy stories in their actual relation to life, the sincerity of their belief in life, and a kind of freshness that come from ignorance, give them a power of their own.