ademic pacificist and a great god in the place. Another, a
quiet Georgian manor house, was owned by a London publisher, an ardent
Liberal whose particular branch of business compelled him to keep in
touch with the new movements. I used to see him hurrying to the station
swinging a little black bag and returning at night with the fish for
dinner.

I soon got to know a surprising lot of people, and they were the
rummiest birds you can imagine. For example, there were the Weekeses,
three girls who lived with their mother in a house so artistic that you
broke your head whichever way you turned in it. The son of the family
was a conscientious objector who had refused to do any sort of work
whatever, and had got quodded for his pains. They were immensely proud
of him and used to relate his sufferings in Dartmoor with a gusto which
I thought rather heartless. Art was their great subject, and I am
afraid they found me pretty heavy going. It was their fashion never to
admire anything that was obviously beautiful, like a sunset or a pretty
woman, but to find surprising loveliness in things which I thought
hideous. Also they talked a language that was beyond me. This kind of
conversation used to happen.--MISS WEEKES: 'Don't you admire Ursula
Jimson?' SELF: 'Rather!' MISS W.: 'She is so John-esque in her lines.'
SELF: 'Exactly!' MISS W.: 'And Tancred, too--he is so full of nuances.'
SELF: 'Rather!' MISS W.: 'He suggests one of Degousse's countrymen.'
SELF: 'Exactly!'

They hadn't much use for books, except some Russian ones, and I
acquired merit in their eyes for having read Leprous Souls. If you
talked to them about that divine countryside, you found they didn't
give a rap for it and had never been a mile beyond the village. But
they admired greatly the sombre effect of a train going into Marylebone
station on a rainy day.

But it was the men who interested me most. Aronson, the novelist,
proved on acquaintance the worst kind of blighter. He considered
himself a genius whom it was the duty of the country to support, and he
sponged on his wretched relatives and anyone who would lend him money.
He was always babbling about his sins, and pretty squalid they were. I
should like to have flung him among a few good old-fashioned
full-blooded sinners of my acquaintance; they would have scared him
considerably. He told me that he sought 'reality' and 'life' and
'truth', but it was hard to see how he could know much about them, for
he s