‘I’m a rank outsider,’ he said. ‘I heard one of them call me a rank outsider. Thought I couldn’t hear him. If he’d said it in the street, I’d have laid him in the gutter. A rank outsider. Do you think, George, that you will ever make me anything else?’ ‘What does it matter if you are a rank outsider in some things? Patience, and let us go on.’ At first he grumbled; he could see no use in trifles, such as ceremonials of society. We have simplified these of late years; still, some forms remain. ‘You will want to be received,’ I told him, ‘as a man of culture. These are the outward and visible forms of culture.’ He listened and reflected. Presently I observed that he took greater interest in things--he was realizing what things meant. Finally, the recognition of things arrived quite suddenly. Then he grumbled no longer. He looked about him, interested and amused. He sat out plays, and talked about the life pictured--a very queer sort of life it is, for the most part. As for the acting, he accepted the finest acting as part of the play, without comment. He was like an intelligent traveller--he wanted to know what it all meant, the complex civilization of this realm; where the Court comes in; what part is played in the daily life by the noble Lords, whose House he was so anxious to improve for them, feeling quite capable of adjusting reforms and bringing the Peers up-to-date by himself alone and unaided; how the Church affects society; what are the powers and the limitations of money; what is the real influence of the Press; what is the position of the professions. He wanted to know everything. As for me, I had never before asked myself any of these questions, being quite satisfied with the little narrow world that surrounded me. I tried to interest him in Art. It was impossible. He said that he would rather look at a tree than the picture of a tree. I tried him with fiction. He said that the world of reality was a great deal more interesting than the world of imagination. I tried him with poetry. He said that, if a thing had to be said, it was best said plainly, in prose. He wanted to survey the whole world, and to understand the whole world. When one assumes the attitude of an impartial inquirer, and learns what can be said on the other side, the Radical disappears and the Reformer succeeds. There is, of course, the danger, if one inquires too long, and with more than a certain amount of sympathy, that the Reformer himself may vanish, leaving the Philosopher behind. Or, perhaps, Radical, Reformer and Philosopher may all live together in the same brain. Robert was passing into the second stage. He snorted at things no longer; he rather walked round them, examined them, and inquired how they came. ‘I confess,’ he said, ‘that I was ignorant when I came here. My knowledge was of books. Men and women I did not take into account. It is worth all the trouble of learning your confounded manners only to have found out the men and women.’