soul of a counter-jumper, and the result was long hair, a velvet coat, a
red tie, bumptious bearing, and an altogether scatter-brained and fly-away
manner. In figure he was long and willowy, and reminded me irresistibly of
an unhealthy cellar-grown potato plant. My circle of acquaintances rapidly
enlarged, and soon, instead of having too much time on my hands for
reading and study, I had too little. At one of the Sunday evening lectures
of the Democratic Club, at which I had become a regular attendant, I made
the acquaintance of Nekrovitch, the famous Nihilist, and his wife. I took
to him instinctively, drawn by the utter absence of sham or "side" which
characterised the man. I had never understood why Socialism need imply the
arraying of oneself in a green curtain or a terra-cotta rug, or the
cultivation of flowing locks, blue shirts, and a peculiar cut of clothes:
and the complete absence of all such outward "trade marks" pleased me in
the Russian. He invited me to his house, and I soon became a constant
visitor. In the little Chiswick house I met a class of people who
stimulated me intellectually, and once more aroused my rather waning
enthusiasm for the "Cause." The habit of taking nothing for granted, of
boldly inquiring into the origin of all accepted precepts of morality, of
intellectual speculation unbiassed by prejudice and untrammelled by all
those petty personal and party questions and interests which I had seen
occupy so much time and thought at the Democratic Club, permeated the
intellectual atmosphere. Quite a new side of the problem--that of its
moral bearings and abstract rights as opposed to the merely material right
to daily bread which had first appealed to my sense of justice and
humanity--now opened before me. The right to complete liberty of action,
the conviction that morality is relative and personal and can never be
imposed from without, that men are not responsible, or only very partially
so, for their surroundings, by which their actions are determined, and
that consequently no man has a right to judge his fellow; such and similar
doctrines which I heard frequently upheld, impressed me deeply. I was