its leading joys. You buy things, clothes and trinkets for yourself and
presents for your friends. Presents always seemed to be flying about
in that circle; flowers and boxes of sweets were common currency. My
cousins were always getting and giving, my uncle caressed them with
parcels and cheques. They kissed him and he exuded sovereigns as a
stroked APHIS exudes honey. It was like the new language of the Academy
of Lagado to me, and I never learnt how to express myself in it, for
nature and training make me feel encumbered to receive presents and
embarrassed in giving them. But then, like my father, I hate and
distrust possessions.

Of the quality of their private imagination I never learnt anything; I
suppose it followed the lines of the fiction they read and was romantic
and sentimental. So far as marriage went, the married state seemed at
once very attractive and dreadfully serious to them, composed in equal
measure of becoming important and becoming old. I don't know what they
thought about children. I doubt if they thought about them at all. It
was very secret if they did.

As for the poor and dingy people all about them, my cousins were always
ready to take part in a Charitable Bazaar. They were unaware of any
economic correlation of their own prosperity and that circumambient
poverty, and they knew of Trade Unions simply as disagreeable external
things that upset my uncle's temper. They knew of nothing wrong in
social life at all except that there were "Agitators." It surprised them
a little, I think, that Agitators were not more drastically put down.
But they had a sort of instinctive dread of social discussion as of
something that might breach the happiness of their ignorance....

5

My cousins did more than illustrate Marx for me; they also undertook a
stage of my emotional education. Their method in that as in everything
else was extremely simple, but it took my inexperience by surprise.

It must have been on my third visit that Sybil took me in hand. Hitherto
I seemed to have seen her only in profile, but now she became almost
completely full face, manifestly regarded me with those violet eyes
of hers. She passed me things I needed at breakfast--it was the first
morning of my visit--before I asked for them.

When young men are looked at by pretty cousins, they become intensely
aware of those cousins. It seemed to me that I had always admired
Sybil's eyes very greatly, and that there was someth