As I walked home from Kosinski's in the early morning I felt profoundly depressed. The weather had turned quite chilly and a fine drizzling rain began to fall, promising one of those dull, wet days of which we experience so many in the English spring. The streets were deserted but for the milkmen going their rounds, and the tired-looking policemen waiting to be relieved on their beats. I felt that feeling of physical exhaustion which one experiences after being up all night, when one has not had the opportunity for a wash and change of clothes. I was not sleepy, but my eyes were hot and dry under their heavy eyelids, my bones ached, my muscles felt stiff; I had the uncomfortable consciousness that my hair was disordered and whispy, my hat awry, my skin shiny; and this sub-consciousness of physical unattractiveness heightened the sense of moral degradation. I felt weary and disgusted, and it was not only, nor even principally, the knowledge that Kosinski had gone out of my life which accounted for this. I felt strangely numbed and dull, curiously able to look back on that incident as if it had occurred to some one else. Every detail, every word, was vividly stamped on my brain: I kept recurring to them as I trudged along, but in a critical spirit, smiling every now and again as the humour of some strangely incongruous detail flashed across my brain. What really weighed me down was a sense of the futility, not only of Anarchist propaganda but of things in general. What were we striving for? Happiness, justice? And the history of the world shows that man has striven for these since the dawn of humanity without ever getting much nearer the goal. The few crumbs of personal happiness which one might hope for in life were despised and rejected by men like Armitage, Kosinski, and Bonafede, yet all three were alike powerless to bring about the larger happiness they dreamed of. I had acquired a keener sense of proportion since the days when I had first climbed the breakneck ladder of Slater's Mews, and I now realised that the great mass of toiling humanity ignored our existence, and that the slow, patient work of the ages was hardly likely to be helped or hindered by our efforts. I did not depreciate the value of thought, of the effort made by the human mind to free itself from the shackles of superstition and slavery; of that glorious unrest which spurs men on to scrutinise the inscrutable, ever baffled yet ever returning to the struggle, which alone raises him above the brute creation and which, after all, constitutes the value of all philosophy quite apart from the special creed each school may teach; and I doubted not for a moment that the yeast of Anarchist thought was leavening the social conceptions of our day.