k to be love and desire
of Sylvia. And then, as like as not, I would receive a letter from my
lady-love the next day, the refrain of which would be:

"How strange you are. How you muddle me! Indeed, you don't understand;
and neither, perhaps, do I understand you. It seems to me you would drag
sacred matters down to the dusty level of your politics."

The dusty level of my politics! That was it. The affairs of the world,
of mortal men, they were as the affairs of ants to pretty Sylvia. A
lofty and soaring view, you say? Why, no; not that exactly, for what
remained of real and vital moment in her mind, to the exclusion of all
serious interest in humanity? There remained, as a source of much
gratification, what I called the daily dramatic performance at St.
Jude's; and there remained as the one study worthy of serious devotion
and interest--Sylvia Wheeler's own soul. She never sought to influence
the welfare of another person's soul. Indeed, as she so often said to
me, with a kind of plaintiveness which should have softened my
declamatory ardour but did not, she did not like speaking of such
matters at all; she regarded it as a kind of desecration.

No, it did not seem to me a lofty and inspiring view that Sylvia took.
On the contrary, it exercised a choking effect upon me, by reason of
what I regarded as its intense littleness and narrowness. The too often
bitter and sordid realities of the struggle of life, as I saw it in
London, had the effect upon me of making Sylvia's esoteric exclusiveness
of interest seem so petty as to be an insult to human intelligence. I
would stare out of the train windows, on my way back from Weybridge, at
the countless lights, the endless huddled roofs of London; and, seeing
in these a representation of the huge populace of the city, I would
stretch out my arms in an impotent embrace, muttering:

"Yes, indeed, you _are_ real; you _are_ more important than any other
consideration; you are _not_ the mere shadows she thinks you; your
service is of more moment than any miracle, or than any nursing of one's
own soul!"

And so I would make my way to Fleet Street, where I forced myself to
believe I served the people by teaching them to despise patriotism, to
give nothing, but to organize and demand, and keep on demanding and
obtaining, more and more, from a State whose business it was to give,
and to ask nothing in return. I was becoming known, and smiled at
mockingly, for my earnest devotion to