nd I have unconsciously spread it on the table by
my side. "Will you drink with us, sir?" adds another. He is not of the
Middle Class.

"Thank you, I will," I answer, and my first interlocutor glances over
the paper.

"Are you a Socialist?" he inquires. "Yes," I reply. "So am I." I rise,
and we shake hands. This, my friend, was beyond all my imagining. It
is, moreover, _not_ middle class. I have ridden in a suburban train
day after day for years, with people who lived in the same street,
without exchanging a word. Here, in this tavern, convention dares not
to show her head. And I am warmed as with the cheerful sun.

"Have you been in?" asks the man who hands me my beer, and he flings
his head back to indicate the theatre.

"Not yet," I answer. "What have you on this week?"

"_A Sister's Sin_. You should see it. Come to-morrow."

* * * * *

"_A Sister's Sin_!"

I shall not go to see it. I dare not. I had intended to ask my
Socialist whether he could solve the problem of the Middle Class for
me, but he has done it. "_Au theatre on exagere toujours._" I hardly
know which are the more baffling--the Middle Ages or the Middle
Classes.

XV

I have just been looking through an old, old note-book of mine, the
sort of book compiled, I suppose, by every man who really sets out on
the long road. I remember buying the thing, a stout volume with
commercially marbled covers, at a stationer's shop in the Goswell
Road. I wonder if the salesman dreamed that it would be used by the
grimy apprentice to transcribe extracts from such writers as Kant and
Lotze, Swinburne and Taine, Emerson and Schopenhauer? How strong, how
dear to me, was all that pertained to Metaphysic in that long ago!
Often, too, I see original speculations, naive dogmatism, sandwiched
between the contextual excerpts.

Worthless, of course--it should be hardly necessary to say so. And
yet, as I turn the leaves, I get occasional glimpses of real thought
shining through the overstrained self-consciousness, illuminating my
youthful priggishness of demeanour. For instance, how could I have
been so prescient to have coupled Emerson and Schopenhauer together
so persistently? Here, smudged and corrected to distraction, is a
passionate defence of the former, occasioned by some academical
trifler dubbing him a mere echo of Carlyle and Coleridge. I almost
lived on Emerson in those days, to such good purpose, indeed, that I
know