from her. Odd old Ewart! It was a relationship so alien to my orderly
conceptions of honour, to what I could imagine any friend of mine doing,
that I really hardly saw it with it there under my nose. But I see it
and I think I understand it now....

Before I fully grasped the discursive manner in which Ewart was
committed to his particular way in life, I did, I say, as the broad
constructive ideas of socialism took hold of me, try to get him to work
with me in some definite fashion as a socialist.

"We ought to join on to other socialists," I said.

"They've got something."

"Let's go and look at some first."

After some pains we discovered the office of the Fabian Society, lurking
in a cellar in Clement's Inn; and we went and interviewed a rather
discouraging secretary who stood astraddle in front of a fire and
questioned us severely and seemed to doubt the integrity of our
intentions profoundly. He advised us to attend the next open meeting in
Clifford's Inn and gave us the necessary data. We both contrived to get
to the affair, and heard a discursive gritty paper on Trusts and one of
the most inconclusive discussions you can imagine. Three-quarters of
the speakers seemed under some jocular obsession which took the form
of pretending to be conceited. It was a sort of family joke, and as
strangers to the family we did not like it.... As we came out through
the narrow passage from Clifford's Inn to the Strand, Ewart suddenly
pitched upon a wizened, spectacled little man in a vast felt hat and a
large orange tie.