He pulled up at this and reflected for a time with some distinguished instances in his mind.  They were so distinguished, so dignified, they took their various arts with so admirable a gravity that the soul of this young man recoiled from the verdicts to which his reasoning drove him.  “It’s not for me to judge them,” he decided, “except in relation to myself.  For them there may be tremendous significances in Art.  But if these do not appear to me, then so far as I am concerned they do not exist for me.  They are not in my world.  So far as they attempt to invade me and control my attitudes or my outlook, or to judge me in any way, there is no question of their impudence.  Impudence is the word for it.  My world is real.  I want to be really aristocratic, really brave, really paying for the privilege of not being a driven worker.  The things the artist makes are like the things my private dream-artist makes, relaxing, distracting.  What can Art at its greatest be, pure Art that is, but a more splendid, more permanent, transmissible reverie!  The very essence of what I am after is not to be an artist. . . .”

After a large and serious movement through his mind he came back to Science, Philosophy or Politics as the sole three justifications for the usurpation of leisure.

So far as devotion to science went, he knew he had no specific aptitude for any departmentalized subject, and equally he felt no natural call to philosophy.  He was left with politics. . . .

“Or else, why shouldn’t I go down there and pick up a shovel and set to work?  To make leisure for my betters. . . .”

And now it was that he could take up the real trouble that more than anything else had been keeping him ineffective and the prey of every chance demand and temptation during the last ten months.  He had not been able to get himself into politics, and the reason why he had not been able to do so was that he could not induce himself to fit in.  Statecraft was a remote and faded thing in the political life of the time; politics was a choice of two sides in a game, and either side he found equally unattractive.  Since he had come down from Cambridge the Tariff Reform people had gone far to capture the Conservative party.  There was little chance of a candidature for him without an adhesion to that.  And he could find nothing he could imagine himself working for in the declarations of the Tariff Reform people.  He distrusted them, he disliked them.  They took all the light and pride out of imperialism, they reduced it to a shabby conspiracy of the British and their colonies against foreign industrialism.  They were violent for armaments and hostile to education.  They could give him no assurance of any scheme of growth and unification, and no guarantees against the manifest dangers of economic disturbance and political corruption a tariff involves.  Imperialism without noble imaginations, it seemed to him, was simply nationalism