As society is constituted in England to-day, a man of my sort may be almost as completely isolated, socially, in a place like Dorking as he would expect to be in the middle of the Sahara. The labouring sort of folk, the trades-people, and the landowners and county families, each form compact social microcosms. The latter class, in normal circumstances, remains not so much indifferent to as unaware of the existence of such people as myself, as bachelors in country-town lodgings. The other two compact little worlds had nothing to offer me socially. And so, socially, I had no existence at all. The same holds good, to a great extent, of my sort of person practically anywhere to-day. (The latter part of the nineteenth century produced a quite large number of people who belonged to no recognised class or order in our social cosmos.) But it is most noticeable in the case of such a man living in a country town. In London, or Paris, or New York, there is no longer any question of a man being in or out of society, since there is no longer any compact division of the community which forms society. Rather, the community divides itself into hundreds of circles, most of which meet others at some point of their circumference. My doctor in Dorking was a bachelor. I did not attend any church. There literally was no person in that district with whom I held any social intercourse whatever. And then, by chance, and in a single day, I became acquainted with many of the socially superior sort of people in my neighbourhood. Arncliffe's chief leader writer on the _Advocate_ staff was a man called Ernest Lane, who, after winning considerable distinction at Oxford, falsified cynical anticipations by winning a good deal more distinction in the world outside the university. It was known that he had been invited to submit himself to the electors of a constituency in one of the Home counties, and his work while secretary to a prominent statesman had earned him a high reputation in political circles. His book on greater British legislation and administration added greatly to this reputation, and his friends were rather surprised when Lane showed that he intended to stick to the writer's life rather than enter parliament, or accept any political appointment. Without having become very intimate, Lane and myself had been distinctly upon good and friendly terms during my time in the _Advocate_ office, and he had visited me three or four times in my retreat in Dorking. Lane thought well of my work, and he was the only man I knew whose political conversation and views had interested me. It was not without some pleasure, therefore, that I read a letter received from him in which he said he was coming to see me.