man with interest. No doubt he was only a successor of the purveyor
of discords who darkened my boyhood. It was amazing to find an
influence so terrible embodied in a creature so palpably petty. He
was seated some way down a table at right angles to the one at which
I sat, a man of mean appearance with a greyish complexion, thin,
with a square nose, a heavy wiry moustache and a big Adam's apple
sticking out between the wings of his collar. He ate with
considerable appetite and unconcealed relish, and as his jaw was
underhung, he chummed and made the moustache wave like reeds in the
swell of a steamer. It gave him a conscientious look. After dinner
he a little forced himself upon me. At that time, though the shadow
of my scandal was already upon me, I still seemed to be shaping for
great successes, and he was glad to be in conversation with me and
anxious to intimate political sympathy and support. I tried to make
him talk of the HOME CHURCHMAN and the kindred publications he ran,
but he was manifestly ashamed of his job so far as I was concerned.

"One wants," he said, pitching himself as he supposed in my key, "to
put constructive ideas into our readers, but they are narrow, you
know, very narrow. Very." He made his moustache and lips express
judicious regret. "One has to consider them carefully, one has to
respect their attitudes. One dare not go too far with them. One
has to feel one's way."

He chummed and the moustache bristled.

A hireling, beyond question, catering for a demand. I gathered
there was a home in Tufnell Park, and three boys to be fed and
clothed and educated. . . .