another Byron, be blighted into renown through her
treachery by a misplaced passion for _her_. As I paced the sands at
Littlehampton, I pictured myself as having discovered her faithlessness
on the eve of my own departure for the Embassy at Constantinople, and I
addressed to her the following epistle, which I could not, with all my
ingenuity, manage to protract beyond the two opening stanzas:

For you the ballroom's jaded glow--
The gems unworthy of your hair.
For me the milk-white domes that blow
Their bubbles to the orient air.

Your heart at dawn in curtained ease
Shall ache through dreams that are not rest.
But mine shall leap to meet the seas
That broke against Leander's breast.

Such dreams are not more absurd than those of the French Jacobins, who
thought themselves Gracchus or Brutus; and they were accompanied when I
was at Littlehampton by the growth of other preoccupations, which
related to matters very different from the romance of individual
adolescence. Mr. Philpot, in his own tastes, and also in his choice of
pupils, was fastidious to a degree, which perhaps would be out of date
to-day, and had actually been known to apologize, under his breath, for
the fact that one of his flock--a singularly handsome youth and heir to
an enormous fortune--came of a family which "was still distinctly in
business." But he betrayed, at the same time, strong Radical leanings.
Indeed, through him I first became aware that Radicalism meant more than
some perverse absurdity of the ignorant. He completely bewildered and at
the same time amused his pupils by taking in a paper called _The
Beehive_, one of the earliest of the "Labor organs" of England; and from
this mine of wisdom he would on occasion quote. To most of us the views
expressed by him seemed no more than comic oddities, but they were to
myself so far a definite irritant that I devised, though I never showed
them to him, a series of pictures called "The Radical's Progress," in
which the hero began as a potboy in a public house, and ended as an
overdressed ruffian, waving a tall silk hat and throwing rotten eggs at
Conservative voters from a cart. A taste of Mr. Philpot's equalitarian
sentiments was given to us one day at luncheon, the occasion being his
wife's commendation of a celebrated Sussex bootmaker who had just called
for orders. "I like that man," she said. "He is always so civil and
respectful." "Mary Jane! Mary Jane