admire him. And the world, being young and generous, did admire him
without any strong compulsion. At Oxford the City tailor's son scribbled,
talked, debated furiously; the excited utterance of the man of the
people, naked and unashamed, passed for the insolence of the aristocrat
of letters. He crowned himself with _kudos_. How the beggars shouted when
he got up to speak! He could hear them now. How they believed in him!
Young Tyson was a splendid fellow; he could do anything he chose--knock
you off a leading article or lead a forlorn hope. In time he began to be
rather proud of his origin; it showed up his pluck, his grit, the stuff
he was made of. He owed everything to himself.

And that last year when he let himself go altogether--there again
his origin told. He had flung himself into dissipation in the spirit
of dissent. His passions were the passions of Demos, violent and
revolutionary. Tyson the Baptist minister had despised the world,
vituperated the flesh, stamped on it and stifled it under his decent
broadcloth. If it had any rights he denied them. Therefore in the person
of his son they reasserted their claim; and young Tyson paid it honorably
and conscientiously to the full. In a year's time he knew enough of the
world and the lust of it to satisfy the corrupt affections of generations
of Baptist ministers, with the result that his university career was
suddenly, mysteriously cut short. He had made too many experiments with
life.

After that his life had been all experiments, most of them failures. But
they served to separate him forever from his place and his people, from
all the hateful humiliating past. He could still say that he owed
everything to himself.

Then his uncle's death gave him the means of realizing his supreme
ambition. By that time he had forgotten that he ever had an uncle. His
family had effaced itself. Backed by an estate and a good income, there
was no reason why its last surviving member should not be a conspicuous
social success. Well, it seemed that he was a conspicuous social failure.

He owed that to Stanistreet, curse him! curse him! His brain still
reeled, and he roused himself with difficulty from his retrospective
dream. When he spoke again it was with the conscious incisiveness of a
drunken man trying hard to control his speech.

"Would you mind telling me who you've told this story to? Lady Morley,
for one. My wife," he raised his voice in his excitement, "my wife, I
su