e reeds in the swell of a steamer. It gave him a conscientious
look. After dinner he a little forced himself upon me. At that time,
though the shadow of my scandal was already upon me, I still seemed to
be shaping for great successes, and he was glad to be in conversation
with me and anxious to intimate political sympathy and support. I tried
to make him talk of the HOME CHURCHMAN and the kindred publications he
ran, but he was manifestly ashamed of his job so far as I was concerned.

"One wants," he said, pitching himself as he supposed in my key, "to put
constructive ideas into our readers, but they are narrow, you know, very
narrow. Very." He made his moustache and lips express judicious regret.
"One has to consider them carefully, one has to respect their attitudes.
One dare not go too far with them. One has to feel one's way."

He chummed and the moustache bristled.

A hireling, beyond question, catering for a demand. I gathered there
was a home in Tufnell Park, and three boys to be fed and clothed and
educated....

I had the curiosity to buy a copy of his magazine afterwards, and it
seemed much the same sort of thing that had worried my mother in my
boyhood. There was the usual Christian hero, this time with mutton-chop
whiskers and a long bare upper lip. The Jesuits, it seemed, were still
hard at it, and Heaven frightfully upset about the Sunday opening of
museums and the falling birth-rate, and as touchy and vindictive as
ever. There were two vigorous paragraphs upon the utter damnableness
of the Rev. R. J. Campbell, a contagious damnableness I gathered, one
wasn't safe within a mile of Holborn Viaduct, and a foul-mouthed
attack on poor little Wilkins the novelist--who was being baited by the
moralists at that time for making one of his big women characters, not
being in holy wedlock, desire a baby and say so....

The broadening of human thought is a slow and complex process. We do go
on, we do get on. But when one thinks that people are living and dying
now, quarrelling and sulking, misled and misunderstanding, vaguely
fearful, condemning and thwarting one another in the close darknesses of
these narrow cults--Oh, God! one wants a gale out of Heaven, one wants a
great wind from the sea!

3

While I lived at Penge two little things happened to me, trivial in
themselves and yet in their quality profoundly significant. They had
this in common, that they pierced the texture of the life I was quietly
takin