a rich man. Rich
men had not, so far, been common in the advanced section of the party.
Lankester, in whom the idealist and the wire-puller were shrewdly mixed,
was well aware that the reforms he desired could only be got by
extensive organization; and he knew precisely what the money cost of
getting them would be. Rich men, therefore, were the indispensable tools
of his ideas; and among his own group he who had never possessed a
farthing of his own apart from the earnings of his brain and pen was
generally set on to capture them.

Was that really why he had come down?--to make sure of this rich
Laodicean? Lankester fell into a reverie.

He was a man of curious gifts and double personality. It was generally
impossible to lure him, on any pretext, from the East End and the House
of Commons. He lived in a block of model dwellings in a street opening
out of the East India Dock Road, and his rooms, whenever he was at home,
were overrun by children from the neighboring tenements. To them he was
all gentleness and fun, while his command of invective in a public
meeting was little short of terrible. Great ladies and the
country-houses courted him because of a certain wit, a certain
charm--above all, a certain spiritual power--which piqued the worldling.
He flouted and refused the great ladies--with a smile, however, which
gave no offence; and he knew, notwithstanding, everybody whom he wanted
to know. Occasionally he made quiet spaces in his life, and disappeared
from London for days or weeks. When he reappeared it was often with a
battered and exhausted air, as of one from whom virtue had gone out. He
was, in truth, a mystic of a secular kind: very difficult to class
religiously, though he called himself a member of the Society of
Friends. Lady Lucy, who was of Quaker extraction, recognized in his ways
and phrases echoes from the meetings and influences of her youth. But,
in reality, he was self-taught and self-formed, on the lines of an
Evangelical tradition, which had owed something, a couple of generations
back, among his Danish forebears, to the influence of Emanuel
Swedenborg. This tradition had not only been conveyed to him by a
beloved and saintly mother; it had been appropriated by the man's inmost
forces. What he believed in, with all mystics, was _prayer_--an intimate
and ineffable communion between the heart and God. Lying half asleep on
the House of Commons benches, or strolling on the Terrace, he pursued
often