or literary men and people of culture. They think it
will pay them better to run their wretched sheets for the proletariat.
We shall see. Oh, I am better out of it, of course. I see that
clearly; and I am thankful to be clear of their drudgery.' (My
listening mind brightened.) 'But yet--there's your education to be
thought of. Expenses are--And, of course--H'm!' (Clouds shadowed my
outlook once more.) 'This pitiful anxiety to cling to the safety of a
salary is humiliating--unworthy of one's manhood. Good heavens! why
was I born, not one of them, and yet dependent on the caprices of such
people?'

It may be filial partiality, but something makes me feel genuinely
sorry for my father, as I look back upon that outpouring of his in
Richmond Park. And that was in the 'sixties. I wonder how the
twentieth-century journalism would have struck him. The later
subtleties of unadmitted advertising, the headline, the skittishly
impressionistic descriptive masterpieces of 'our special
representative,' and the halfpenny newspapers, were all unthought-of
boons, then. And as for the advancing democracy of his prophecies,
why, there were quite real sumptuary laws of a sort still holding sway
in the 'sixties, and well on into the 'eighties, for that matter!

We walked home from the Roehampton Gate, and in some respects I was no
longer quite a child when I climbed into bed that night.

III

In my eyes, at all events, there was a kind of a partnership between
my father and myself from this time onward. Before, there had been
three groups in my scheme of things: upon the one hand, Amelia (or her
successor) and myself, with, latterly, some of the people of the
Putney Academy for the Sons of Gentlemen; in another and quite
separate compartment, my father; and, finally, the rest of the world.
Gradually, now, I came to see things rather in this wise: upon the one
hand, my father and myself, with, perhaps, a few other folk as
satellites; and, on the other hand, the rest of the world.

And at this early stage I began to regard the world--every one outside
our own small camp--in an antagonistic light, as a hostile force, as
the enemy. Life was a battle in which the odds were fearfully uneven;
for it was my father and myself against the world. Needless to say, I
did not put the matter to myself in those words; but at this precise
period I am well assured that I acquired this attitude of mind. It
dated from the admittance into partnership w