in my circumstances; the house at Penge was given up, and my
Staffordshire uncle arranged for me to lodge during school terms
with a needy solicitor and his wife in Vicars Street, S. W., about a
mile and a half from the school. So it was I came right into
London; I had almost two years of London before I went to Cambridge.

Those were our great days together. Afterwards we were torn apart;
Britten went to Oxford, and our circumstances never afterwards threw
us continuously together until the days of the BLUE WEEKLY.

As boys, we walked together, read and discussed the same books,
pursued the same enquiries. We got a reputation as inseparables and
the nickname of the Rose and the Lily, for Britten was short and
thick-set with dark close curling hair and a ruddy Irish type of
face; I was lean and fair-haired and some inches taller than he.
Our talk ranged widely and yet had certain very definite
limitations. We were amazingly free with politics and religion, we
went to that little meeting-house of William Morris's at Hammersmith
and worked out the principles of Socialism pretty thoroughly, and we
got up the Darwinian theory with the help of Britten's medical-
student brother and the galleries of the Natural History Museum in
Cromwell Road. Those wonderful cases on the ground floor
illustrating mimicry, dimorphism and so forth, were new in our
times, and we went through them with earnest industry and tried over
our Darwinism in the light of that. Such topics we did
exhaustively. But on the other hand I do not remember any
discussion whatever of human sex or sexual relationships. There, in
spite of intense secret curiosities, our lips were sealed by a
peculiar shyness. And I do not believe we ever had occasion either
of us to use the word "love." It was not only that we were