"But we cannot afford to lose such good stuff," he insisted. "Come, Raymond, now, don't you think your sister ought to get that into print?" "I think you should publish it, Isabel, if you could," he replied. "Could! Why any of our papers would be only too delighted to have it. Let me take it down to the _Democrat_," he said, mentioning the name of a paper which Raymond often brought home with him. "Oh, if you really think it worth while, I shall be only too pleased," I replied. Thus was effected my first introduction to the actual Socialist party. My article was printed and I was asked for others. I made the acquaintance of the editor, who, I must confess, spite of my enthusiasm, soon struck me as a rather weak-kneed and altogether unadmirable character. He thought it necessary to get himself up to look like an artist, though he had not the 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,