"But I suppose you've got to do it. You
could have come here--That don't matter, though, now... You'll have your
time and spend your money, and be a poor half-starved clergyman, mucking
about with the women all the day and afraid to have one of your own
ever, or you'll be a schoolmaster or some such fool for the rest of your
life. Or some newspaper chap. That's what you'll get from Cambridge. I'm
half a mind not to let you. Eh? More than half a mind...."

"You've got to do the thing you can," he said, after a pause, "and
likely it's what you're fitted for."

4

I paid several short visits to Staffordshire during my Cambridge days,
and always these relations of mine produced the same effect of hardness.
My uncle's thoughts had neither atmosphere nor mystery. He lived in
a different universe from the dreams of scientific construction that
filled my mind. He could as easily have understood Chinese poetry. His
motives were made up of intense rivalries with other men of his class
and kind, a few vindictive hates springing from real and fancied
slights, a habit of acquisition that had become a second nature, a keen
love both of efficiency and display in his own affairs. He seemed to
me to have no sense of the state, no sense and much less any love of
beauty, no charity and no sort of religious feeling whatever. He had
strong bodily appetites, he ate and drank freely, smoked a great deal,
and occasionally was carried off by his passions for a "bit of a spree"
to Birmingham or Liverpool or Manchester. The indulgences of these
occasions were usually followed by a period of reaction, when he was
urgent for the suppression of nudity in the local Art Gallery and a
harsh and forcible elevation of the superficial morals of the valley.
And he spoke of the ladies who ministered to the delights of his
jolly-dog period, when he spoke of them at all, by the unprintable
feminine equivalent. My aunt he treated with a kindly contempt and
considerable financial generosity, but his daughters tore his heart; he
was so proud of them, so glad to find them money to spend, so resolved
to own them, so instinctively jealous of every man who came near them.

My uncle has been the clue to a great number of men for me. He was an
illuminating extreme. I have learnt what not to expect from them through
him, and to comprehend resentments and dangerous sudden antagonisms I
should have found incomprehensible in their more complex forms, if I had
n