engaged about that time in discovering, to my own extreme and lasting
astonishment, that I was not an atheist. But there were others also at
loose ends who were engaged in discovering what Carlyle called (I think
with needless delicacy) the fact that ginger is hot in the mouth.

I value that time, in short, because it made me acquainted with a good
representative number of blackguards. In this connection there are two
very curious things which the critic of human life may observe. The
first is the fact that there is one real difference between men and
women; that women prefer to talk in twos, while men prefer to talk in
threes. The second is that when you find (as you often do) three young
cads and idiots going about together and getting drunk together every
day you generally find that one of the three cads and idiots is (for
some extraordinary reason) not a cad and not an idiot. In these small
groups devoted to a drivelling dissipation there is almost always one
man who seems to have condescended to his company; one man who, while he
can talk a foul triviality with his fellows, can also talk politics with
a Socialist, or philosophy with a Catholic.

It was just such a man whom I came to know well. It was strange,
perhaps, that he liked his dirty, drunken society; it was stranger
still, perhaps, that he liked my society. For hours of the day he would
talk with me about Milton or Gothic architecture; for hours of the night
he would go where I have no wish to follow him, even in speculation. He
was a man with a long, ironical face, and close and red hair; he was
by class a gentleman, and could walk like one, but preferred, for some
reason, to walk like a groom carrying two pails. He looked like a sort
of Super-jockey; as if some archangel had gone on the Turf. And I shall
never forget the half-hour in which he and I argued about real things
for the first and the last time.

.....

Along the front of the big building of which our school was a part ran
a huge slope of stone steps, higher, I think, than those that lead up to
St. Paul's Cathedral. On a black wintry evening he and I were wandering
on these cold heights, which seemed as dreary as a pyramid under the
stars. The one thing visible below us in the blackness was a burning and
blowing fire; for some gardener (I suppose) was burning something in the
grounds, and from time to time the red sparks went whirling past us like
a swarm of scarlet insects in the dark. Abov