"After the first shock my mother resigned herself to the inevitable and hoped for the best. And for a couple of years we managed to rub along without any scandals. In our several ways, my brother and I were busy with life, as far as we knew it. He went up to the city every day, and played football and cricket, but the serious business of his life was girls. He seemed to have hundreds. If I saw him in the Strand, on Saturday, he would be with three or four. If I met him on Hadley Common, on Sunday, he would have three or four there, but fresh ones. He had them in the trains, he lunched with them in the city. Barring the few hours he spent in our house at night he lived chiefly on girls. There were a score or so in the house where he worked, a wholesale business in Wood Street. It was a mania, you might say; but it was the girls who had the mania, not he. He spent all his money as he got it on them, he borrowed more and spent that. One thing particularly annoyed me just about this time, and that was his free way of borrowing my clothes when they fitted him. Vests and ties especially. You may think it a trivial matter, but to me there was something exasperating in seeing one's brother on a park seat in the dusk, with his girl's head leaning on one's own fancy vest! He would just shy whatever he had borrowed on the bed and leave me to pick the hair off it. What they call a _Superman_, I believe, nowadays. I had another name for him. "Apart from these annoyances, I was sliding along a well-oiled groove in life. It generally happens that a young man in such a position as mine marries and settles down for good. Now it may have been that my brother's wholesale dealings with girls threw me to the other extreme. I don't think that had much to do with it. I think, now, that I had a natural bend towards Culture. "Don't misunderstand me," said Mr. Carville. "I use that word without any doubt of what it means. I know George Du Maurier's sneers. Culture means an instinct for the best. I had that. I have it now. "I don't say that culture is opposed to marriage. That would be nonsense. But it may seriously interfere with marriage. A young man in the twenties has no irresistible desire for matrimony. As a rule I mean. And if sport or business or, as in my case, study, takes up his attention, he will put it off for a while. That's what happened to me. I had access to books. I had an easy job and no great responsibility. I knew nothing about the world really; I only read about it in books. It seemed to me a splendid thing to be a learned man. I became a book-worm, reading several hours a day. What was I aiming at? Upon my soul I can't say. It was just blind instinct leading me on to read the books that since then have become part of me.