dilettante. I read a good many books, and tried feverishly to write in the
style of the authors who most attracted me, I settled down at home, more or
less, in a country village where I knew everyone; I travelled a little; and
I paid occasional visits to London, where several of my undergraduate and
school friends lived, with a vague idea of getting to know literary people;
but they were not very easy to meet, and, when I did meet them, they did
not betray any very marked interest in my designs and visions.

I was dining one night at a restaurant with a College friend of mine, Jack
Vincent, whose tastes were much the same as my own, only more strenuous;
his father and mother lived in London, and when I went there I generally
stayed with them. They were well-to-do, good-natured people; but, beyond
occasionally reminding Jack that he ought to be thinking about a
profession, they left him very much to his own devices, and he had begun to
write a novel, and a play, and two or three other masterpieces.

That particular night his father and mother were dining out, so we
determined to go to a restaurant. And it was there that Vincent told me
about "Father" Payne, as he was called by his friends, though he was a
layman and an Anglican. He had heard all about him from an Oxford man,
Leonard Barthrop, some years older than ourselves, who was one of the
circle of men whom Father Payne had collected about him. Vincent was very
full of the subject. He said that Father Payne was an elderly man, who had
been for a good many years a rather unsuccessful teacher in London, and
that he had unexpectedly inherited a little country estate in
Northamptonshire. He had gradually gathered about him a small knot of men,
mainly interested in literature, who were lodged and boarded free, and were
a sort of informal community, bound by no very strict regulations, except
that they were pledged to produce a certain amount of work at stated
intervals for Father Payne's inspection. As long as they did this, they