sames. There was a sprinkling of
manifest seers and prophetesses in shapeless garments, far too many, I
thought, for really easy social intercourse, and any conversation at any
moment was liable to become oracular. One was in a state of tension
from first to last; the most innocent remark seemed capable of exploding
resentment, and replies came out at the most unexpected angles. We Young
Liberals went about puzzled but polite to the gathering we had evoked.
The Young Liberals' tradition is on the whole wonderfully discreet,
superfluous steam is let out far away from home in the Balkans or
Africa, and the neat, stiff figures of the Cramptons, Bunting Harblow,
and Lewis, either in extremely well-cut morning coats indicative of the
House, or in what is sometimes written of as "faultless evening dress,"
stood about on those evenings, they and their very quietly and simply
and expensively dressed little wives, like a datum line amidst lakes and
mountains.

I didn't at first see the connection between systematic social
reorganisation and arbitrary novelties in dietary and costume, just as
I didn't realise why the most comprehensive constructive projects should
appear to be supported solely by odd and exceptional personalities.
On one of these evenings a little group of rather jolly-looking pretty
young people seated themselves for no particular reason in a large
circle on the floor of my study, and engaged, so far as I could judge,
in the game of Hunt the Meaning, the intellectual equivalent of Hunt the
Slipper. It must have been that same evening I came upon an unbleached
young gentleman before the oval mirror on the landing engaged in
removing the remains of an anchovy sandwich from his protruded
tongue--visible ends of cress having misled him into the belief that he
was dealing with doctrinally permissible food. It was not unusual to be
given hand-bills and printed matter by our guests, but there I had
the advantage over Lewis, who was too tactful to refuse the stuff, too
neatly dressed to pocket it, and had no writing-desk available upon
which he could relieve himself in a manner flattering to the giver. So
that his hands got fuller and fuller. A relentless, compact little woman
in what Margaret declared to be an extremely expensive black dress
has also printed herself on my memory; she had set her heart upon my
contributing to a weekly periodical in the lentil interest with which
she was associated, and I spent much time