And then, quite suddenly, Mr. Ambrose left us. He packed up his things and his books, and went away; and I understood, somehow, that he would not be coming back. I did not ask where he was going, nor why he was going. His departure, like his presence, was a fact which I accepted without curiosity. Not without satisfaction, though; it was distinctly nice to feel that the house was rid of him. And then seven or eight years passed, the longest seven or eight years, I suppose, that one is likely ever to encounter, the seven or eight years in the course of which one grows from a child of ten or eleven to a youth approaching twenty. And during those years I had plenty of other things to think of than Mr. Ambrose. It was time more than enough for him to become a mere dim outline on the remote horizon. My childish conception of the man, as you perceive, was sufficiently rudimental. He represented to me the incarnation of a single principle: severity; as I, no doubt, represented to him the incarnation of vexatious noise. For the rest, we overlooked each other. I had been told that he was one of the greatest and wisest and best men in the world: you have seen how little that mattered to me. It would probably have mattered quite as little if the information had been more specific, if I had been told everything there was to tell about him, all that I have learned since. How could it have mattered to a child to know that the testy old man who sat in his room all day and wrote, and every evening received a stream of shabby visitors, was the prophet of a new social faith, the founder of a new sect, the author of a new system for the regeneration of mankind, of a new system of human government, a new system of ethics, a new system of economics? What could such a word as “anthropocracy” have conveyed to me? Or such a word as “philarchy”? Or such a phrase as “Unification versus Civilisation”? My childish conception of the man was extremely rudimental. But I saw a good deal of him again when I was eighteen, nineteen; and at eighteen, nineteen, one begins, more or less, to observe and appreciate, to receive impressions and to form conclusions. Anyhow, the impressions I received of Mr. Ambrose, the conclusions I formed respecting him, when I was eighteen or nineteen, are still very fresh in my mind; and I can’t help believing that on the whole they were tolerably just. I think they were just, because they seem to explain him; they seem to explain him in big and in little. They explain his career, his failure, his table manners, his testiness, his disregard of other people’s rights and feelings, his apparent selfishness; they explain the queerest of the many queer things he did. They explain his taking the bank the other night at baccarat, for instance; and they explain what happened afterwards, before the night was done.