large and honourable too. To a certain extent they were so; there was
a fine sincere curiosity, a desire for the strength and power of
scientific knowledge and a passion for intellectual exercise; but I
do not think those forces alone would have kept me at it so grimly
and closely if Wimblehurst had not been so dull, so limited and so
observant. Directly I came into the London atmosphere, tasting freedom,
tasting irresponsibility and the pull of new forces altogether, my
discipline fell from me like a garment. Wimblehurst to a youngster in my
position offered no temptations worth counting, no interests to conflict
with study, no vices--such vices as it offered were coarsely stripped of
any imaginative glamourfull drunkenness, clumsy leering shameful lust,
no social intercourse even to waste one's time, and on the other hand it
would minister greatly to the self-esteem of a conspicuously industrious
student. One was marked as "clever," one played up to the part, and
one's little accomplishment stood out finely in one's private reckoning
against the sunlit small ignorance of that agreeable place. One went
with an intent rush across the market square, one took one's exercise
with as dramatic a sense of an ordered day as an Oxford don, one burnt
the midnight oil quite consciously at the rare respectful, benighted
passer-by. And one stood out finely in the local paper with one's
unapproachable yearly harvest of certificates. Thus I was not only a
genuinely keen student, but also a little of a prig and poseur in those
days--and the latter kept the former at it, as London made clear.

Moreover Wimblehurst had given me no outlet in any other direction.

But I did not realise all this when I came to London, did not perceive
how the change of atmosphere began at once to warp and distribute my
energies. In the first place I became invisible. If I idled for a day,
no one except my fellow-students (who evidently had no awe for me)