He had made his plans. He would rent a small house, next door to where his mother still lived in Bruton Square, and practise there as a solicitor. The old lady was still active and capable. If need be--if he had to go alone--she could keep house for him. He was keen on Bruton Square. It was where the mean part of the town began. It would not be too far for the poor to come to him. The little modest house would not frighten them with suggestion of charges beyond their means, of contemptuous indifference to their unprofitable bits of business. He would be able to help them, to keep them from falling into the hands of charlatans. They would come to trust him in their troubles. He might often be able to serve as mediator, as peacemaker between them. It would be a legitimate way of earning his living. It was essential that he should earn his living. That seemed to him of tremendous importance. If the world were to be saved it must be saved by all men working together for God. That must be the dream, the goal. He wanted to tell men that the Christ-life could be lived not by the few but by all; not alone by celibates and mendicants--of what use would that be--but by men with wives and children. It must come to be the life of the street, the market-place, the home. If she would come with him, join her voice with his, tell the people that man and woman could live happily together without this luxury and ostentation for which Youth daily sold its birthright of love and joy, condemned itself to frenzied toil and haunting fear; that life was not a thing of furniture and clothes, of many servants, of fine houses and rich foods; that a man and woman who had known these things could choose to give them up, find comfort and content without them; that having food and raiment there was no need of this savage struggling for more--this greed and covetousness that for so long had pierced the world with many sorrows. If only she would come with him. Together they might light a lamp. How could he ask her? The mere physical discomforts and privations, it would not be the fear of these that would hold her back. Demand the heroic of her--call upon her, in the name of any cause worth fighting for, to face suffering, death itself, and she would put her hand in his and go with him gladly. She had envied Betty, going out alone to fight starvation and disease amid the terrors of a winter in the Russian steppes. “I’d have loved to be going with her,” she had told him. “It must be from my mother that it comes to me. Some strange thing happened to her when she was a girl. She would never tell me what, though I knew it had been her trouble all her life. And when she lay dying she drew me down to her, and whispered to me that in her youth God had called to her and she had not obeyed. It was dad and we children that had hindered her. She had married a husband so she could not come.”