't--you have no Republican movement whatever to fall back
upon. You lost it during the Era of Good Taste. The country, I say, is
destitute of ideas, and you have no ideas to give it. I don't see what
you will do.... For my own part, I mean to spend a year or so between a
window and my writing-desk."

I paused. "I think, gentlemen," began Parvill, "that we hear all this
with very great regret...."

4

My estrangement from Margaret stands in my memory now as something that
played itself out within the four walls of our house in Radnor Square,
which was, indeed, confined to those limits. I went to and fro between
my house and the House of Commons, and the dining-rooms and clubs and
offices in which we were preparing our new developments, in a state
of aggressive and energetic dissociation, in the nascent state, as a
chemist would say. I was free now, and greedy for fresh combination. I
had a tremendous sense of released energies. I had got back to the sort
of thing I could do, and to the work that had been shaping itself for
so long in my imagination. Our purpose now was plain, bold, and
extraordinarily congenial. We meant no less than to organise a new
movement in English thought and life, to resuscitate a Public Opinion
and prepare the ground for a revised and renovated ruling culture.

For a time I seemed quite wonderfully able to do whatever I wanted to
do. Shoesmith responded to my first advances. We decided to create a
weekly paper as our nucleus, and Crupp and I set to work forthwith to
collect a group of writers and speakers, including Esmeer, Britten, Lord
Gane, Neal, and one or two younger men, which should constitute a more
or less definite editorial council about me, and meet at a weekly lunch
on Tuesday to sustain our general co-operations. We marked our claim
upon Toryism even in the colour of our wrapper, and spoke of ourselves
collectively as the Blue Weeklies. But our lunches were open to all
sorts of guests, and our deliberations were never of a character to
control me effectively in my editorial decisions. My only influential
councillor at first was old Britten, who became my sub-editor. It was
curious how we two had picked up our ancient intimacy again and resumed
the easy give and take of our speculative dreaming schoolboy days.

For a time my life centred altogether upon this journalistic work.
Britten was an experienced journalist, and I had most of the necessary
instincts for the business