Such seemed to me the upshot of all the intellectual and moral teaching of Oxford, of the faintly hinted liberalism of Mr. Philpot's teachings which had preceded them, and of my own enlarging experiences of male and female society. That such a conclusion was satisfactory I did not for a moment feel, but here was the very reason which urged me on to elaborate it. The mood which expresses itself in a sense that life is merely ridiculous was, so my consciousness protested, nothing more and nothing better than a disease, and my hope was that I should get rid of it by expressing it once for all as pungently and as completely as I could, after which I would address myself to the project of finding a foundation for some positive philosophy of life which should indeed be fortified by reason, but against which reason should not prevail. When, however, _The New Republic_ had been completed and given to the world, I felt that my sense of the absurdities of current liberal philosophy had not even yet exhausted itself; and I presently supplemented that work by another--_The New Paul and Virginia, or Positivism on an Island_, a short satirical story in the style of Voltaire's _Candide_. This is a story of an atheistic professor, such as Tyndall, who, together with a demimondaine, now the wife of a High Church colonial bishop, is wrecked on a desert island, and there endeavors to redeem her from the degrading superstitions of theism and to make her a partner with him in the sublime service of Humanity--of that "Grand Etre," so he says to her, "which, so far as we are concerned, has come in the course of progress to consist of you and me." _The New Paul and Virginia_ was followed some two years later by _Is Life Worth Living?_ a formal philosophical treatise, in which the values of life and their connection with religious belief, the methods of fiction being abandoned, were submitted to scientific analysis. These three books represent the compound results produced by the liberalism of Oxford on a mind such as my own, which had been cradled in the conservatisms of the past. But meanwhile I had left Oxford behind me, and the death of my father and other family events which occurred about that time left me free to determine my own movements, the consequence being that thenceforward the months of what is called "the season" found me year by year in London from Easter till the approach of August. Of my early experiences of London, and of the kind of life I lived there, I will now give some brief account, not disdaining the humble aid of gossip. CHAPTER VI THE BASIS OF LONDON SOCIETY Early Experiences of London Society--Society Thirty Years Ago Relatively Small--Arts and Accomplishments Which Can Flourish in Small Societies Only