d no tact; he belied the opinion then. I remember perfectly how, so
soon as we could get together, he began his attack: "You may have
grounds of quarrel with me; you have none against Mrs. Jenkin; and
before I say another word, I want you to promise you will come to _her_
house as usual." An interview thus begun could have but one ending: if
the quarrel were the fault of both, the merit of reconciliation was
entirely Fleeming's.

When our intimacy first began, coldly enough, accidentally enough on his
part, he had still something of the Puritan, something of the inhuman
narrowness of the good youth. It fell from him slowly, year by year, as
he continued to ripen, and grow milder, and understand more generously
the mingled characters of men. In the early days he once read me a
bitter lecture; and I remember leaving his house in a fine spring
afternoon, with the physical darkness of despair upon my eyesight. Long
after he made me a formal retractation of the sermon and a formal
apology for the pain he had inflicted; adding drolly, but truly, "You
see, at that time I was so much younger than you!" And yet even in those
days there was much to learn from him; and above all his fine spirit of
piety, bravely and trustfully accepting life, and his singular delight
in the heroic.

His piety was, indeed, a thing of chief importance. His views (as they
are called) upon religious matters varied much; and he could never be
induced to think them more or less than views. "All dogma is to me mere
form," he wrote; "dogmas are mere blind struggles to express the
inexpressible. I cannot conceive that any single proposition whatever in
religion is true in the scientific sense; and yet all the while I think
the religious view of the world is the most true view. Try to separate
from the mass of their statements that which is common to Socrates,
Isaiah, David, St. Bernard, the Jansenists, Luther, Mahomet,
Bunyan--yes, and George Eliot: of course you do not believe that this
something could be written down in a set of propositions like Euclid,
neither will you deny that there is something common, and this something
very valuable.... I shall be sorry if the boys ever give a moment's
thought to the question of what community they belong to--I hope they
will belong to the great community." I should observe that as time went
on his conformity to the Church in which he was born grew more complete,
and his views drew nearer the conventional. "The l