s mind a good deal. He said it needed un-Potterising as much as the
State, or literature, or journalism, or even the drama, and that
Potterism in it was even more dangerous than in these. So, when he
could, he induced parsons to join the Anti-Potter League.

We weren't all tied up, I may say, with the political party principles
very commonly held by members of the 1917 Club. I certainly wasn't a
Socialist, nor, wholly, I think, a Radical; neither at that time was
Peacock, though he became more so as time went on; nor, certainly, was
Katherine. Juke was, because he believed that in these principles was the
only hope for the world. And the twins were, because the same principles
were the only wear for the young intellectual, at that moment. Johnny, in
all things the glass of fashion and the mould of form, wore them as he
wore his monocle, quite unconscious of his own reasons for both. But it
was the idea of the Anti-Potter League to keep clear of parties and
labels. You _can_ belong to a recognised political party and be an
Anti-Potterite, for Potterism is a frame of mind, not a set of opinions
(Juke was, after Katherine, the best Anti-Potterite I have known, though
people did their best to spoil him), but it is easier, and more
compatible with your objects, to be free to think what you like about
everything. Once you are tied up with a party, you can only avoid
second-handedness, taking over views ready-made, if you are very
strong-minded indeed.

Thursday was a fairly free afternoon for me, and Jane and I somehow
got into a habit of going off somewhere together after lunch, or
staying on at the club and talking. Jane seemed to me to be
increasingly interesting; she was acquiring new subtleties,
complexities, and comprehensions, and shedding crudities. She wrote
better, too. We took her stuff sometimes for the _Fact_. At the same
time, she seemed to me to be morally deteriorating, as people who
grab and take things they oughtn't to have always do deteriorate. And
she was trying all the time to square Hobart with the rest of her
life, fitting him in, as it were, and he didn't fit in. I was
interested to see what she was making of it all.

4

One Thursday in early September, when Juke and Jane and I had lunched
alone together at the club, and Jane and I had gone off to some meeting
afterwards, Juke dropped in on me in the evening after dinner. He sat
down and lit a pipe, then got up and walked about the room, and I k