against
rebellion. He came of a family of cranks, in which all the oldest
people had all the newest notions. One of his uncles always walked about
without a hat, and another had made an unsuccessful attempt to walk
about with a hat and nothing else. His father cultivated art and
self-realisation; his mother went in for simplicity and hygiene. Hence
the child, during his tenderer years, was wholly unacquainted with any
drink between the extremes of absinth and cocoa, of both of which he
had a healthy dislike. The more his mother preached a more than Puritan
abstinence the more did his father expand into a more than
pagan latitude; and by the time the former had come to enforcing
vegetarianism, the latter had pretty well reached the point of defending
cannibalism.

Being surrounded with every conceivable kind of revolt from infancy,
Gabriel had to revolt into something, so he revolted into the only thing
left--sanity. But there was just enough in him of the blood of these
fanatics to make even his protest for common sense a little too fierce
to be sensible. His hatred of modern lawlessness had been crowned also
by an accident. It happened that he was walking in a side street at the
instant of a dynamite outrage. He had been blind and deaf for a moment,
and then seen, the smoke clearing, the broken windows and the bleeding
faces. After that he went about as usual--quiet, courteous, rather
gentle; but there was a spot on his mind that was not sane. He did
not regard anarchists, as most of us do, as a handful of morbid men,
combining ignorance with intellectualism. He regarded them as a huge and
pitiless peril, like a Chinese invasion.

He poured perpetually into newspapers and their waste-paper baskets
a torrent of tales, verses and violent articles, warning men of this
deluge of barbaric denial. But he seemed to be getting no nearer his
enemy, and, what was worse, no nearer a living. As he paced the Thames
embankment, bitterly biting a cheap cigar and brooding on the advance of
Anarchy, there was no anarchist with a bomb in his pocket so savage or
so solitary as he. Indeed, he always felt that Government stood alone
and desperate, with its back to the wall. He was too quixotic to have
cared for it otherwise.

He walked on the Embankment once under a dark red sunset. The red river
reflected the red sky, and they both reflected his anger. The sky,
indeed, was so swarthy, and the light on the river relatively so
lurid, t