How is one with no experience of affairs to get an experience of affairs when the door of affairs is closed to one by one’s own convictions?  Outside of affairs how can one escape being flimsy?  How can one escape becoming merely an intellectual like those wordy Fabians, those writers, poseurs, and sham publicists whose wrangles he had attended?  And, moreover, there is danger in the leisure of your intellectual.  One cannot be always reading and thinking and discussing and inquiring. . . .  Would it not be better after all to make A concession, swallow home rule or tariff reform, and so at least get his hands on things?

And then in a little while the party conflict would swallow him up?

Still it would engage him, it would hold him.  If, perhaps, he did not let it swallow him up.  If he worked with an eye open for opportunities of self-assertion. . . .

The party game had not altogether swallowed “Mr. Arthur.” . . .

But every one is not a Balfour. . . .

He reflected profoundly.  On his left knee his left hand rested with two fingers held up.  By some rapid mental alchemy these fingers had now become Home Rule and Tariff Reform.  His right hand which had hitherto taken no part in the controversy, had raised its index finger by imperceptible degrees.  It had been raised almost subconsciously.  And by still obscurer processes this finger had become Mrs. Skelmersdale.  He recognized her sudden reappearance above the threshold of consciousness with mild surprise.  He had almost forgotten her share in these problems.  He had supposed her dismissed to an entirely subordinate position. . . .

Then he perceived that the workmen in the chalk pit far below had knocked off and were engaged upon their midday meal.  He understood why his mind was no longer moving forward with any alacrity.

Food?

The question where he should eat arose abruptly and dismissed all other problems from his mind.  He unfolded a map.  Here must be the chalk pit, here was Dorking.  That village was Brockham Green.  Should he go down to Dorking or this way over Box Hill to the little inn at Burford Bridge.  He would try the latter.

14

The April sunset found our young man talking to himself for greater emphasis, and wandering along a turfy cart-track through a wilderness mysteriously planted with great bushes of rhododendra on the Downs above Shere.  He had eaten a belated lunch at Burford Bridge, he had got some tea at a little inn near a church with a splendid yew tree, and for the rest of the time he had wandered and thought.  He had travelled perhaps a dozen or fifteen miles, and a good way from his first meditations above the Dorking chalk pit.