Later he wrote, 'You were right as to one thing; every one I meet,
including my relations, is persuaded that I am either a newspaper
correspondent or writing a book, or, more probably, both. These taints
cling so. I feel like a reformed drunkard, who has taken the pledge but
still carries about with him a red nose and shaky hands, so that he gets
no credit for his new sobriety. What's the good of my telling people here
that I don't write, when I suppose I've the mark of the beast stamped all
over me? And they play up; they talk for me to record it....

'I find all kinds of odd things here. Among others, an English doctor, in
the local lunatic asylum. Mad as a hatter, poor devil--now--whatever he
was when they shut him up. I dare say he'd been through enough even then
to turn his brain. I can't find out who his friends in England are....'

5

Gideon stopped writing, and took Jane's last letter out of his pocket. It
occurred to him that he was in no sense answering it. Not that Jane
would mind; that wasn't the sort of thing she did mind. But it struck him
suddenly how difficult it had grown to him to answer Jane's letters--or,
indeed, any one else's. He could not flatter himself that he was already
contracting the inarticulate habit, because he could pour forth fluently
enough about his own experiences; but to Jane's news of London he had
nothing to say. A new paper had been started; another paper had died;
some one they knew had deserted from one literary coterie to another;
some one else had turned from a dowdy into a nut; Jane had been seeing a
lot of bad plays; her novel--'my confused mass of self-expression,' she
called it to him--was coming out next week. All the familiar personal,
literary, political, and social gossip, which he too had dealt in once;
Jane was in the thick of it still, and he was turning stupid, like a man
living in the country; he could not answer her. Or, perhaps, would not;
because the thing that absorbed him at present was how people lived and
thought, and what could be made of them--not the conscious, intellectual,
writing, discussing, semi-civilised people (semi-civilised--what an
absurd word! What is complete civilisation, that we should bisect it and
say we have half, or any other exact fraction? Partly civilised, Gideon
amended it to), but the great unconscious masses, hardly civilised at
all, who shape things, for good or evil, in the long run.

Gideon folded up Jane's letter and p