ardent curiosity. One day I got a chance to open it, and I read on the
title-page, _Introduction to the Study of Sociology_, by Herbert Spencer.
Turning the pages, I encountered some remarks on Napoleon that astonished
and charmed me. I said: 'Why are not our school histories like this?' The
owner of the book caught me. I asked her to lend it to me, but she would
not, nor would she give me any reason for declining. Soon afterwards I
left school. I persuaded my aunt to let me join the Free Library at the
Wedgwood Institution. But the book was not in the catalogue. (How often,
in exchanging volumes, did I not gaze into the reading-room, where men
read the daily papers and the magazines, without daring to enter!) At
length I audaciously decided to buy the book. I ordered it, not at our
regular stationer's in Oldcastle Street, but at a little shop of the
same kind in Trafalgar Road. In three days it arrived. I called for it,
and took it home secretly in a cardboard envelope-box. I went to bed
early, and I began to read. I read all night, thirteen hours. O book with
the misleading title--for you have nothing to do with sociology, and you
ought to have been called _How to Think Honestly_--my face flushed again
and again as I perused your ugly yellowish pages! Again and again I
exclaimed: 'But this is marvellous!' I had not guessed that anything so
honest, and so courageous, and so simple, and so convincing had ever been
written. I am capable now of suspecting that Spencer was not a supreme
genius; but he taught me intellectual courage; he taught me that nothing
is sacred that will not bear inspection; and I adore his memory. The next
morning after breakfast I fell asleep in a chair. 'My dear!' protested
Aunt Constance. 'Ah,' I thought, 'if you knew, Aunt Constance, if you had
the least suspicion, of the ideas that are surging and shining in my
head, you would go mad--go simply mad!' I did not care much for
deception, but I positively hated clumsy concealment, and the red book
was in the house; at any moment it might be seized. On a shelf of books
in my bedroom was a novel called _The Old Helmet_, probably the silliest