The house we came to was small but comfortable. My new friend explained that he was able to keep alive by dealing with the outlaws, who kept money current among themselves, and, indeed, had come to regard him as their counsellor and peacemaker, and never returned from their raids without bringing him some tribute. Seeing me dubious of the morality of this, he explained that under the old order he had been a shareholder in joint-stock companies and accepted his share of the profits without scruple as to how they had been obtained. He told me further that he was quite alone in the city, and that no one else maintained the old life. He had registered himself in compliance with the law, but could not leave the mathematical work to which his life had been devoted, for he believed that he would achieve results which would survive all the vicissitudes of Fattish civilisation even as the work of Pythagoras had survived ancient Greece. The number of outlaws, he said, was growing, and there would eventually be a revolution, to lead which he was preparing and educating his son, Edmund. His own sympathies, he declared, had at first been with the women, who had been driven to extricate the country from the vicious circle of war into which it had been drawn by the egregious folly of men. But when, having achieved this, they abused their power and, in the intoxication of their success, defied nature herself, then he had abandoned all hope and had taken the only means of dissociating himself from the life of his country, namely, by staying where he was. To be sure the women had established agriculture on a sound basis, but it was vain for them to breed cattle if they would not breed themselves. I asked him if he was a widower. He said No. XI: EDMUND This man’s son was the most charming boy I ever set eyes on. He was eighteen, but had the carriage and assurance of a young man in his prime, most resolute and happy. He liked talking to me and was more communicative than his father. For a fortnight he would work steadily at his books, imbibing the principles of government in the philosophers from Plato down. He thought they were all wrong, said so, and but for his simplicity I should have put him down as conceited. It was very slowly as I talked to him that I came to realise the revolution in thought produced by the great European wars and the terrible consequences, how fatal they had been to the old easy idealism. The new spirit in its generous acceptance of the gross stuff of human nature and its indomitable search for beauty in it has been expressed for all time by our poet, Hohlenheim, and I only need state here that I encountered it for the first time in that ruined city. Not, however, till Hohlenheim expressed it did I recognise it.