him to work
with me in some definite fashion as a socialist.

"We ought to join on to other socialists," I said.

"They've got something."

"Let's go and look at some first."

After some pains we discovered the office of the Fabian Society, lurking
in a cellar in Clement's Inn; and we went and interviewed a rather
discouraging secretary who stood astraddle in front of a fire and
questioned us severely and seemed to doubt the integrity of our
intentions profoundly. He advised us to attend the next open meeting in
Clifford's Inn and gave us the necessary data. We both contrived to get
to the affair, and heard a discursive gritty paper on Trusts and one of
the most inconclusive discussions you can imagine. Three-quarters of
the speakers seemed under some jocular obsession which took the form
of pretending to be conceited. It was a sort of family joke, and as
strangers to the family we did not like it.... As we came out through
the narrow passage from Clifford's Inn to the Strand, Ewart suddenly
pitched upon a wizened, spectacled little man in a vast felt hat and a
large orange tie.

"How many members are there in this Fabian Society of yours?" he asked.

The little man became at once defensive in his manner.

"About seven hundred," he said; "perhaps eight."

"Like--like the ones here?"

The little man gave a nervous self-satisfied laugh. "I suppose they're
up to sample," he said.

The little man dropped out of existence and we emerged upon the Strand.
Ewart twisted his arm into a queerly eloquent gesture that gathered up
all the tall facades of the banks, the business places, the projecting
clock and towers of the Law Courts, the advertisements, the luminous
signs, into one social immensity, into a capitalistic system gigantic
and invincible.

"These socialists have no sense of proportion," he said. "What can you
expect of them?"

IV

Ewart, as the embodiment of talk, was certainly a leading factor in my
conspicuous failure to go on studying. Social theory in its first crude
form of Democratic Socialism gripped my intelligence more and more
powerfully. I argued in the laboratory with the man who shared my bench
until we quarreled and did not speak and also I fell in love.

The ferment of sex had been creeping into my being like a slowly
advancing tide through all my Wimblehurst days, the stimulus of London
was like the rising of a wind out of the sea that brings the waves in
fast and high. Ewart had his