ow? Nothing! I had never been
anywhere, I had never met anybody in particular, I had never been in
love. I had never waked up. I was in a sort of trance, surrounded by the
traditions of the genteel professional class. Of course, in a dim way I
knew that my mother expected me to be something exceptional, but I was
too comfortable to make any effort. It seemed to me I was quite
unconventional enough in being such a reader and in keeping clear of
girls. I wonder where I would have landed, supposing I had never waked
up.

"My brother was going his way all this time, when all of a sudden he
roused me up again. For a long time he had been earning twenty-five
shillings a week and spending forty, and my mother had been making good
the deficit. She had just given him a five-pound note to pay for his
quarterly season-ticket on the railway. He didn't pay it. Just went on
travelling to the city with the old one. Of course, a lot of people had
done that trick and the Company were wise to it. My brother was caught
and summoned before the Lord Mayor at the Mansion House. You can believe
my mother was distressed. It wouldn't have been so bad if he had only
held his tongue and let her pay the forty shillings fine and costs. No!
he had to give the Lord Mayor a piece of his mind. And that made the
evening papers feature the amusing incident, as they call it.

"I must admit the boy made out a very good case. He told the Court his
father, his brother and himself had been travelling over the line for
something like sixteen years. Altogether we had paid the railways two
hundred pounds in fares. 'Now,' says he to the Court, 'if I had done two
hundred pounds worth of business with a firm, they wouldn't be down on
me for being a day or two late with a small account of five pounds,
would they? They'd be glad to accommodate me. But the railway wants to
put me in prison.' Well, the Lord Mayor happened to be a shareholder in
the railway, and of course he couldn't admit that at all. He fined him
the regulation forty shillings and several pounds cost. But as I said,
this peculiar argument of my brother's got the case into a prominent
position and everybody saw it. His employers saw it and cashiered him
the next morning. My uncle, who lived at Surbiton, saw it and wrote to
my mother.

"The first I saw of it was in the papers. I remember feeling sick and
giddy all over when I saw our name in the police court news. '_The Seamy
Side_' they called it. W