This book, which I am bringing you, is a very small return for all you have given me. In every mood, in every phase of my shifting pilgrimage, I have found you ever the same--loving, sympathetic, wise. You have been with me in my success, and in my happiness, in my failures and in my disappointments, in the hours when I have followed wandering fires. There has never yet come to me a moment when I did not know that I had but to stretch out my hand to find you at my side. In return for so much, this first book of mine is a very small offering. But yet I bring it to you, simply because it is my first. For whatever altars I may have raised by the wayside, whatever ephemeral loyalties may have swayed me, my one real lodestar has always been your love, and sympathy, and guidance. And as in life it has always been to you first that I have brought my troubles, my aims, my hopes, so in the world of ideas it is to you that I would bring this, the first-born of my dreams. Accept it. For it carries with it the very real and very deep love of a most grateful son. A.W. CONTENTS Preface _page_ 9 BOOK I: WARP AND WOOF I Groping 15 II Finding his Feet 21 III The New Philosophy 31 IV New Faces 44 V Emerging 52 VI Clarke 62 VII When One is in Rome 69 BOOK II: THE TANGLED SKEIN I Quantum Mutatus 79 II Healthy Philistinism 102 III Tin Gods 119 IV Through a Glass Darkly 130 BOOK III: UNRAVELLING THE THREADS I Common Room Faces 134 II Carnival 169 III Broadening Outlook 179 IV Thirds 185 V Dual Personality 196 VI The Games Committee 200 VII Rebellion 208 VIII The Dawning of many Dreams 213 BOOK IV: THE WEAVING I The Twilight of the Gods 226 II Setting Stars 239 III Romance 242 IV The Dawn of Nothing 249 V The Things that Seem 259 VI The Tapestry Completed 277 PREFACE TO NEW EDITION Books have their fates and this one's has been curious. I wrote it between January and March 1916, when I was seventeen and a half years old and in camp at Berkhamsted with the Inns of Court O.T.C. I loathed it there, everything about it, the impersonal military machine, the monotonous routine of drills and musketry, the endless foot-slogging, the perpetual petty fault-finding. I kept comparing my present life with that which I had been leading ten, eighteen, thirty months ago at Sherborne, as a schoolboy.