He had exercised me so greatly that I lay awake at nights thinking
him over, and discoursed and answered him in my head as I went in the
morning to the College. I am by nature a doer and only by the way a
critic; his philosophical assertion of the incalculable vagueness of
life which fitted his natural indolence roused my more irritable and
energetic nature to active protests. "It's all so pointless," I said,
"because people are slack and because it's in the ebb of an age. But
you're a socialist. Well, let's bring that about! And there's a purpose.
There you are!"

Ewart gave me all my first conceptions of socialism; in a little while
I was an enthusiastic socialist and he was a passive resister to the
practical exposition of the theories he had taught me. "We must join
some organisation," I said. "We ought to do things.... We ought to go
and speak at street corners. People don't know."

You must figure me a rather ill-dressed young man in a state of great
earnestness, standing up in that shabby studio of his and saying these
things, perhaps with some gesticulations, and Ewart with a clay-smudged
face, dressed perhaps in a flannel shirt and trousers, with a pipe in
his mouth, squatting philosophically at a table, working at some chunk
of clay that never got beyond suggestion.

"I wonder why one doesn't want to," he said.

It was only very slowly I came to gauge Ewart's real position in the
scheme of things, to understand how deliberate and complete was this
detachment of his from the moral condemnation and responsibilities that
played so fine a part in his talk. His was essentially the nature of
an artistic appreciator; he could find interest and beauty in endless