away, you know," I
used to remark consolingly on these latter occasions; and Edward would
brighten up wonderfully at the suggestion, while Charlotte melted into
tears before her vision of a brother with blistered feet and an empty
belly, passing nights of frost 'neath the lee of windy haystacks.

It was to Edward, of course, that the situation was chiefly productive
of anxiety; and yet the ensuing change in my own circumstances and
position furnished me also with food for grave reflexion. Hitherto I
had acted mostly to orders. Even when I had devised and counselled any
particular devilry, it had been carried out on Edward's approbation,
and--as eldest--at his special risk. Henceforward I began to be anxious
of the bugbear Responsibility, and to realise what a soul-throttling
thing it is. True, my new position would have its compensations.

Edward had been masterful exceedingly, imperious, perhaps a little
narrow; impassioned for hard facts, and with scant sympathy for
make-believe. I should now be free and untrammelled; in the conception
and carrying out of a scheme, I could accept and reject to better
artistic purpose.

It would, moreover, be needless to be a Radical any more. Radical I
never was, really, by nature or by sympathy. The part had been thrust
on me one day, when Edward proposed to foist the House of Lords on our
small Republic. The principles of the thing he set forth learnedly and
well, and it all sounded promising enough, till he went on to explain
that, for the present at least, he proposed to be the House of Lords
himself. We others were to be the Commons. There would be promotions, of
course, he added, dependent on service and on fitness, and open to both
sexes; and to me in especial he held out hopes of speedy advancement.
But in its initial stages the thing wouldn't work properly unless he
were first and only Lord. Then I put my foot down promptly, and said
it was all rot, and I didn't see the good of any House of Lords at all.
"Then you must be a low Radical!" said Edward, with fine contempt. The
inference seemed hardly necessary, but what could I do? I accepted the
situation, and said firmly, Yes, I was a low Radical. In this monstrous
character I had been obliged to masquerade ever since; but now I could
throw it off, and look the world in the face again.

And yet, did this and other gains really out-balance my losses?
Henceforth I should, it was true, be leader and chief; but I should also