ho
almost always spoke at the meetings, and whom Robert was bent on
attaching to the society, had times when the things he was half inclined
to worship one day he was much more inclined to burn the next in the
sight of all men, and when the smallest failure of temper on Robert's
part might have entailed a disagreeable scene, and the possible
formation of a harassing left wing.

But Robert's manner to Wardlaw was that of a grateful younger brother.
It was clear that the Comtist could not formally join the Brotherhood.
But all the share and influence that could be secured him in the
practical working of it was secured him. And what was more, Robert
succeeded in infusing his own delicacy, his own compunctions on the
subject, into the men and youths who had profited in the past by
Wardlaw's rough self-devotion. So that if, through much that went on
now, he could only be a spectator, at least he was not allowed to feel
himself an alien or forgotten.

As to Lestrange, against a man who was as ready to laugh as to preach,
and into whose ardent soul nature had infused a saving sense of the
whimsical in life and character, cynicism and vanity seemed to have no
case. Robert's quick temper had been wonderfully disciplined by life
since his Oxford days. He had now very little of that stiff-neckedness,
so fatal to the average reformer, which makes a man insist on all or
nothing from his followers. He took what each man had to give. Nay, he
made it almost seem as though the grudging support of Lestrange, or the
critical half-patronising approval of the young barrister from the West
who came down to listen to him, and made a favour of teaching in his
night-school, were as precious to him as was the whole-hearted, the
self-abandoning veneration, which the majority of those about him had
begun to show towards the man in whom, as Charles Richards said, they
had 'seen God.'

At last by the middle of November the whole great building, with the
exception of the top floor, was cleared and ready for use. Robert felt
the same joy in it, in its clean paint, the half-filled shelves in the
library, the pictures standing against the walls ready to be hung, the
rolls of bright-coloured matting ready to be laid down, as he had felt
in the Murewell Institute. He and Flaxman, helped by a voluntary army of
men, worked at it from morning till night. Only Catherine could ever
persuade him to remember that he was not yet physically himself.

Then cam