miles, how he had shown himself self-conscious while
there was talk of some honorary degree-giving or other; it would, I have
no doubt, please him greatly if his work were to flower into a crimson
gown in some Academic parterre. Why shouldn't it? But that is incidental
vanity at the worst; he goes on anyhow. Most men don't.

But we had our walk twenty years and more ago now. He was oldish even
then as a young man, just as he is oldish still in middle age. Long
may his industrious elderliness flourish for the good of the world! He
lectured a little in conversation then; he lectures more now and listens
less, toilsomely disentangling what you already understand, giving you
in detail the data you know; these are things like callosities that come
from a man's work.

Our long three weeks' talk comes back to me as a memory of ideas and
determinations slowly growing, all mixed up with a smell of wood smoke
and pine woods and huge precipices and remote gleams of snow-fields and
the sound of cascading torrents rushing through deep gorges far below.
It is mixed, too, with gossips with waitresses and fellow travellers,
with my first essays in colloquial German and Italian, with disputes
about the way to take, and other things that I will tell of in another
section. But the white passion of human service was our dominant theme.
Not simply perhaps nor altogether unselfishly, but quite honestly, and
with at least a frequent self-forgetfulness, did we want to do fine and
noble things, to help in their developing, to lessen misery, to broaden
and exalt life. It is very hard--perhaps it is impossible--to present
in a page or two the substance and quality of nearly a month's
conversation, conversation that is casual and discursive in form, that
ranges carelessly from triviality to immensity, and yet is constantly
resuming a constructive process, as workmen on a wall loiter and jest
and go and come back, and all the while build.

We got it more and more definite that the core of our purpose beneath
all its varied aspects must needs be order and discipline. "Muddle,"
said I, "is the enemy." That remains my belief to this day. Clearness
and order, light and foresight, these things I know for Good. It was
muddle had just given us all the still freshly painful disasters and
humiliations of the war, muddle that gives us the visibly sprawling
disorder of our cities and industrial country-side, muddle that gives us
the waste of life, the limit