“London,” I began. “It’s—so enormous!” “Isn’t it! And it’s all up to nothing. You find chaps keeping grocers’ shops—why the _devil_, Ponderevo, do they keep grocers’ shops? They all do it very carefully, very steadily, very meanly. You find people running about and doing the most remarkable things being policemen, for example, and burglars. They go about these businesses quite gravely and earnestly. I somehow—can’t go about mine. Is there any sense in it at all—anywhere?” “There must be sense in it,” I said. “We’re young.” “We’re young—yes. But one must inquire. The grocer’s a grocer because, I suppose, he sees he comes in there. Feels that on the whole it amounts to a call.... But the bother is I don’t see where I come in at all. Do you?” “Where _you_ come in?” “No, where _you _come in.” “Not exactly, yet,” I said. “I want to do some good in the world—something—something effectual, before I die. I have a sort of idea my scientific work—I don’t know.” “Yes,” he mused. “And I’ve got a sort of idea my sculpture,—but _how_ it is to come in and _why_,—I’ve no idea at all.” He hugged his knees for a space. “That’s what puzzles me, Ponderevo, no end.” He became animated. “If you will look in that cupboard,” he said, “you will find an old respectable looking roll on a plate and a knife somewhere and a gallipot containing butter. You give them me and I’ll make my breakfast, and then if you don’t mind watching me paddle about at my simple toilet I’ll get up. Then we’ll go for a walk and talk about this affair of life further. And about Art and Literature and anything else that crops up on the way.... Yes, that’s the gallipot. Cockroach got in it? Chuck him out—damned interloper....” So in the first five minutes of our talk, as I seem to remember it now, old Ewart struck the note that ran through all that morning’s intercourse.... To me it was a most memorable talk because it opened out quite new horizons of thought. I’d been working rather close and out of touch with Ewart’s free gesticulating way. He was pessimistic that day and sceptical to the very root of things. He made me feel clearly, what I had not felt at all before, the general adventurousness of life, particularly of life at the stage we had reached, and also the absence of definite objects, of any concerted purpose in the lives that were going on all round us. He made me feel, too, how ready I was to take up commonplace assumptions. Just as I had always imagined that somewhere in social arrangements there was certainly a Head-Master who would intervene if one went too far, so I had always had a sort of implicit belief that in our England there were somewhere people who understood what we were all, as a nation, about. That crumpled into his pit of doubt and vanished.