iend Wheeler lived within twenty
miles of it, and I figured him already burgeoning as a magnate of
Moorgate Street. Therefore I had of course written to him of my proposed
descent upon the metropolis, and had been very kindly invited to spend a
week at his father's house in Weybridge before doing anything else.
Accordingly then, having reached Waterloo by a fast train, I left most
of my effects in the cloak-room there, and taking only one bag,
journeyed down to Weybridge.

My friend welcomed me in person in the hall of his father's big and
rather showy house, he having returned from the City earlier than usual
for that express purpose. I had already met his mother and two sisters
upon four separate occasions at Cambridge. Indeed, I may say that I had
almost corresponded with Leslie's second sister, Sylvia. At all events,
we had exchanged half a dozen letters, and I had even begged, and
obtained, a photograph. At Cambridge I thought I had detected in this
delicately pretty, soft-spoken girl, some sympathy and fellow-feeling in
the matter of my own crude gropings toward a philosophy of life. You may
be sure I did not phrase it in that way then. The theories upon which my
discontent with the prevailing order of things was based, seemed to me
then both strong and practical; a little ahead of my time perhaps, but
far from crude or unformed. As I see it now, my creed was rather a
protest against indifference, a demand for some measure of activity in
social economy. That my muse was socialistic seems to me now to have
been mainly accidental, but so it was, and its nutriment had been drawn
largely from such sources as Carpenter's _Civilization: its Cause and
Cure_, in addition to the standard works of the Socialist leaders.

It is quite possible that one of the reasons of my continued friendship
with Leslie Wheeler was the fact that, in his agreeable manner, he
represented in person much of the butterfly indifference to what I
considered the serious problems of life, against which my fulminations
were apt to be directed. I may have clung to him instinctively as a
wholesome corrective. At all events, he submitted, in the main
good-humouredly, to my frequently personal diatribes, and, by his very
complaisance and merry indifference, supplied me again and again with
point and illustration for my sermons.

Leslie's elder sister, Marjory, was his counterpart in petticoats;
merry, frivolous, irresponsible, devoted to the chase of p