etters who are the glory of latter-day England. Then there was Lewis,
further towards Kensington, where his cousins the Solomons and the
Hartsteins lived, a brilliant representative of his race, able,
industrious and invariably uninspired, with a wife a little in revolt
against the racial tradition of feminine servitude and inclined to the
suffragette point of view, and Bunting Harblow, an old blue, and with an
erratic disposition well under the control of the able little cousin he
had married. I had known all these men, but now (with Altiora floating
angelically in benediction) they opened their hearts to me and took
me into their order. They were all like myself, prospective Liberal
candidates, with a feeling that the period of wandering in the
wilderness of opposition was drawing near its close. They were all
tremendously keen upon social and political service, and all greatly
under the sway of the ideal of a simple, strenuous life, a life finding
its satisfactions in political achievements and distinctions. The young
wives were as keen about it as the young husbands, Margaret most of
all, and I--whatever elements in me didn't march with the attitudes and
habits of this set were very much in the background during that time.

We would give little dinners and have evening gatherings at which
everything was very simple and very good, with a slight but perceptible
austerity, and there was more good fruit and flowers and less perhaps in
the way of savouries, patties and entrees than was customary. Sherry we
banished, and Marsala and liqueurs, and there was always good home-made
lemonade available. No men waited, but very expert parlourmaids. Our
meat was usually Welsh mutton--I don't know why, unless that mountains
have ever been the last refuge of the severer virtues. And we talked
politics and books and ideas and Bernard Shaw (who was a department by
himself and supposed in those days to be ethically sound at bottom),
and mingled with the intellectuals--I myself was, as it were, a promoted
intellectual.

The Cramptons had a tendency to read good things aloud on their less
frequented receptions, but I have never been able to participate
submissively in this hyper-digestion of written matter, and generally
managed to provoke a disruptive debate. We were all very earnest to make
the most of ourselves and to be and do, and I wonder still at times,
with an unassuaged perplexity, how it is that in that phase of utmost
earnes