In one respect fortune was kind to him; he was able, within a week or two of his return to London, to get rid of the lease of the haunted little flat in Bloomsbury. The place was dreadful to him, with its empty demand for Griselda, and he left it thankfully for a lodging in Camden Town. There for some weeks he lived drearily in two small rooms, with no occupation to fill up the void in his life, passing hermit days in the company of newspapers and poring over cheap war literature; he bought many newspapers and much war literature and aroused the sympathy of his elderly landlady by his helplessness and continual loneliness. What kept him alive mentally was his thirsty interest in the war; anything and everything that dealt with it was grist to his mill, and he acquired necessarily in the course of his eager reading some smattering of European history and the outlines of European geography. The pamphlet and journal soon ceased to satisfy, and he felt the need of supplementing their superficial comments and sketchy allusions by reading that was not up-to-date. A newspaper denunciation of the Silesian policy of Frederick the Great led him to Macaulay and others on the Kaiser’s ancestor, and references to the Franco-German War resulted in the borrowing from the nearest Free Library of a volume of modern French history. One volume led on to others and the local librarian came to know him as a regular client. His reading was haphazard, but perhaps, for that reason, all the more informative and illuminating. So far he had acquired such small learning as he possessed on a definite and narrow plan, assimilating only such facts as squared with his theories and rejecting all the others; where his new studies were concerned the very blankness of his ignorance was a guarantee of freedom from prejudice. He stumbled amongst facts and opinions, making little of them and yet making much—since for the first time in his life there was no glib mentor to guide him and he was thrown on his own resources. With his theories demolished and his mind blank as a child’s, he became aware of phases of human idea and striving of which he had known nothing in the past, and the resulting comprehension of the existence of spheres outside his own increased his sense of the impossibility of his previous classification of mankind into the well-intentioned and the evil. His own experience had shown him that there might be at least a third class—the ignorant, the mistaken, to which he, William Tully, belonged—and his reading, by its very vagueness, confirmed that personal experience. As he floundered through histories, bewildered and at random, he realized dizzily, but none the less surely, something of the vast and terrifying complexity of these human problems upon which he had once pronounced himself with the certainty of absolute ignorance.