, and had roused the Church of England people
to a kind of competition in denunciation. The old methods of the
Anti-Socialist campaign had been renewed, and had offered far too wide
a scope and too tempting an opportunity for private animosity, to be
restricted to the private affairs of the Socialists. I had intimations
of an extensive circulation of "private and confidential" letters....

I think there can be nothing else in life quite like the unnerving
realisation that rumour and scandal are afoot about one. Abruptly
one's confidence in the solidity of the universe disappears. One
walks silenced through a world that one feels to be full of inaudible
accusations. One cannot challenge the assault, get it out into the open,
separate truth and falsehood. It slinks from you, turns aside its face.
Old acquaintances suddenly evaded me, made extraordinary excuses;
men who had presumed on the verge of my world and pestered me with an
intrusive enterprise, now took the bold step of flat repudiation. I
became doubtful about the return of a nod, retracted all those tentacles
of easy civility that I had hitherto spread to the world. I still grow
warm with amazed indignation when I recall that Edward Crampton, meeting
me full on the steps of the Climax Club, cut me dead. "By God!" I cried,
and came near catching him by the throat and wringing out of him what
of all good deeds and bad, could hearten him, a younger man than I and
empty beyond comparison, to dare to play the judge to me. And then I had
an open slight from Mrs. Millingham, whom I had counted on as one counts
upon the sunrise. I had not expected things of that sort; they were
disconcerting beyond measure; it was as if the world were giving way
beneath my feet, as though something failed in the essential confidence
of life, as though a hand of wet ice had touched my heart. Similar
things were happening to Isabel. Yet we went on working, visiting,
meeting, trying to ignore this gathering of implacable forces against
us.

For a time I was perplexed beyond measure to account for this campaign.
Then I got a clue. The centre of diffusion was the Bailey household. The
Baileys had never forgiven me my abandonment of the young Liberal group
they had done so much to inspire and organise; their dinner-table had
long been a scene of hostile depreciation of the BLUE WEEKLY and all its
allies; week after week Altiora proclaimed that I was "doing nothing,"
and found other causes for