There was a sprinkling of manifest seers and prophetesses in
shapeless garments, far too many, I thought, for really easy social
intercourse, and any conversation at any moment was liable to become
oracular. One was in a state of tension from first to last; the
most innocent remark seemed capable of exploding resentment, and
replies came out at the most unexpected angles. We Young Liberals
went about puzzled but polite to the gathering we had evoked. The
Young Liberals' tradition is on the whole wonderfully discreet,
superfluous steam is let out far away from home in the Balkans or
Africa, and the neat, stiff figures of the Cramptons, Bunting
Harblow, and Lewis, either in extremely well-cut morning coats
indicative of the House, or in what is sometimes written of as
"faultless evening dress," stood about on those evenings, they and
their very quietly and simply and expensively dressed little wives,
like a datum line amidst lakes and mountains.

I didn't at first see the connection between systematic social
reorganisation and arbitrary novelties in dietary and costume, just
as I didn't realise why the most comprehensive constructive projects
should appear to be supported solely by odd and exceptional
personalities. On one of these evenings a little group of rather
jolly-looking pretty young people seated themselves for no
particular reason in a large circle on the floor of my study, and
engaged, so far as I could judge, in the game of Hunt the Meaning,
the intellectual equivalent of Hunt the Slipper. It must have been
that same evening I came upon an unbleached young gentleman before
the oval mirror on the landing engaged in removing the remains of an
anchovy sandwich from his protruded tongue--visible ends of cress
having misled him into the belief that he was dealing with
doctrinally permissible food. It was not unusual to be given hand-