een so dull, so limited and so
observant. Directly I came into the London atmosphere, tasting freedom,
tasting irresponsibility and the pull of new forces altogether, my
discipline fell from me like a garment. Wimblehurst to a youngster in my
position offered no temptations worth counting, no interests to conflict
with study, no vices--such vices as it offered were coarsely stripped of
any imaginative glamourfull drunkenness, clumsy leering shameful lust,
no social intercourse even to waste one's time, and on the other hand it
would minister greatly to the self-esteem of a conspicuously industrious
student. One was marked as "clever," one played up to the part, and
one's little accomplishment stood out finely in one's private reckoning
against the sunlit small ignorance of that agreeable place. One went
with an intent rush across the market square, one took one's exercise
with as dramatic a sense of an ordered day as an Oxford don, one burnt
the midnight oil quite consciously at the rare respectful, benighted
passer-by. And one stood out finely in the local paper with one's
unapproachable yearly harvest of certificates. Thus I was not only a
genuinely keen student, but also a little of a prig and poseur in those
days--and the latter kept the former at it, as London made clear.

Moreover Wimblehurst had given me no outlet in any other direction.

But I did not realise all this when I came to London, did not perceive
how the change of atmosphere began at once to warp and distribute my
energies. In the first place I became invisible. If I idled for a day,
no one except my fellow-students (who evidently had no awe for me)
remarked it. No one saw my midnight taper; no one pointed me out as I
crossed the street as an astonishing intellectual phenomenon. In the
next place I became inconsiderable. In Wimblehurst I felt I stood for
Science; nobody there seemed to have so much as I and to have it so
fully and completely. In London I walked ignorant in an immensity, and
it was clear that among my fellow-students from the midlands and the
north I was ill-equipped and under-trained. With the utmost exertion I
should only take a secondary position among them. And finally, in the
third place, I was distracted by voluminous new interests; London took
hold of me, and Science, which had been the universe, shrank back to the
dimensions of tiresome little formulae compacted in a book. I came to
London in late September, and it was a very d