and care in evading her.

Mingling with the more hygienic types were a number of Anti-Puritan
Socialists, bulging with bias against temperance, and breaking out
against austere methods of living all over their faces. Their manner
was packed with heartiness. They were apt to choke the approaches to
the little buffet Margaret had set up downstairs, and there engage in
discussions of Determinism--it always seemed to be Determinism--which
became heartier and noisier, but never acrimonious even in the small
hours. It seemed impossible to settle about this Determinism of
theirs--ever. And there were worldly Socialists also. I particularly
recall a large, active, buoyant, lady-killing individual with an
eyeglass borne upon a broad black ribbon, who swam about us one evening.
He might have been a slightly frayed actor, in his large frock-coat,
his white waistcoat, and the sort of black and white check trousers that
twinkle. He had a high-pitched voice with aristocratic intonations, and
he seemed to be in a perpetual state of interrogation. "What are we
all he-a for?" he would ask only too audibly. "What are we doing he-a?
What's the connection?"

What WAS the connection?

We made a special effort with our last assembly in June, 1907. We tried
to get something like a representative collection of the parliamentary
leaders of Socialism, the various exponents of Socialist thought and a
number of Young Liberal thinkers into one room. Dorvil came, and Horatio
Bulch; Featherstonehaugh appeared for ten minutes and talked charmingly
to Margaret and then vanished again; there was Wilkins the novelist and
Toomer and Dr. Tumpany. Chris Robinson stood about for a time in a new
comforter, and Magdeberg and Will Pipes and five or six Labour members.
And on our side we had our particular little group, Bunting Harblow,
Crampton, Lewis, all looking as broad-minded and open to conviction as
they possibly could, and even occasionally talking out from their bushes
almost boldly. But the gathering as a whole refused either to mingle or
dispute, and as an experiment in intercourse the evening was a failure.
Unexpected dissociations appeared between Socialists one had supposed
friendly. I could not have imagined it was possible for half so many
people to turn their backs on everybody else in such small rooms as
ours. But the unsaid things those backs expressed broke out, I remarked,
with refreshed virulence in the various organs of the various sect