plum pudding through the window upon Christmas Day?--a man
more joyous than any intellectual man of our world, called himself "the
idle singer of an empty day," created new forms of melancholy, and faint
persons, like the knights and ladies of Burne-Jones, who are never, no not
once in forty volumes, put out of temper. A blunderer who had said to the
only unconverted man at a Socialist picnic in Dublin, to prove that
equality came easy, "I was brought up a gentleman and now as you can see
associate with all sorts" and left wounds thereby that rankled after
twenty years, a man of whom I have heard it said "He is always afraid that
he is doing something wrong and generally is," wrote long stories with
apparently no other object than that his persons might show to one
another, through situations of poignant difficulty the most exquisite
tact.

He did not project like Henley or like Wilde, an image of himself, because
having all his imagination set upon making and doing he had little self
knowledge. He imagined instead new conditions of making and doing; and in
the teeth of those scientific generalizations that cowed my boyhood, I can
see some like imagining in every great change, believing that the first
flying fish first leaped, not because it sought "adaptation" to the air,
but out of horror of the sea.

XIII

Soon after I began to attend the lectures a French class was started in
the old coach-house for certain young Socialists who planned a tour in
France, and I joined it, and was for a time a model student constantly
encouraged by the compliments of the old French mistress. I told my father
of the class, and he asked me to get my sisters admitted. I made
difficulties and put off speaking of the matter, for I knew that the new
and admirable self I was making would turn, under family eyes, into plain
rag-doll. How could I pretend to be industrious, and even carry
dramatisation to the point of learning my lessons, when my sisters were
there and knew that I was nothing of the kind? But I had no argument I
could use, and my sisters were admitted. They said nothing unkind, so far
as I can remember, but in a week or two I was my old procrastinating idle
self and had soon left the class altogether. My elder sister stayed on
and became an embroideress under Miss May Morris, and the hangings round
Morris's big bed at Kelmscott House, Oxfordshire, with their verses about
lying happily in bed when "all birds sing in the town