I not only had the wish, but the imperative need to so do.  To stand like Ajax defying the lightning is magnificent, but as a continuous avocation it is wearisome and unprofitable, especially if carried on in a tiny bachelor suite, an eyrie of a place, at the top of a block of flats in Victoria Street.  Indeed, if I did not add soon to the meagre remains of my fortune, I should not be able to afford the luxury of the bachelor suite.  Conscious of this, I left the lightning alone, after a last denunciatory shake of the fist, and descended into the busy ways of men to look for work.

Thus I entered on the second stage of my career—­that of a soldier of Fortune.  At first I was doubtful as to what path to glory and bread-and-butter I could carve out for myself.  Hitherto I had been Fortune’s darling instead of her mercenary, and she had most politely carved out my paths for me, until she had played her jade’s trick and left me in the ditch.  Now things were different.  I stood alone, ironical, ambitionless, still questioning the utility of human effort, yet determined to play the game of life to its bitter end.  What could I do?

It is true that I had been called to the Bar in my tentative youth, while I drafted documents for my betters to pull to pieces and rewrite at the Foreign Office; but I had never seen a brief, and my memories of Gaius, Justinian, Williams’s “Real Property,” and Austin’s “Jurisprudence,” were as nebulous as those of the Differential Calculus over whose facetiae I had pondered during my schooldays.  The law was as closed to me as medicine.  I had no profession.  I therefore drifted into the one pursuit for which my training had qualified me, namely, political journalism.  I had written much, in my amateur way, during my ten years’ membership of Parliament; why, I hardly know—­not because I needed money, not because I had thoughts which I burned to express, and certainly not through vain desire of notoriety.  Perhaps the motive was twofold, an ingrained Puckish delight in the incongruous—­it seemed incongruous for an airy epicurean like myself to spend stodgy hours writing stodgier articles on Pauper Lunacy and Poor Law Administration—­and the same inherited sense of gentlemanly obligation to do something for one’s king and country as made my ancestors, whether they liked it or not, clothe themselves in uncomfortable iron garments and go about fighting other gentlemen similarly clad, to their own great personal danger.  At any rate, it complemented my work at St. Stephen’s, and doubtless contributed to a reputation in the House which I did not gain through my oratory.  I could therefore bring to editors the stock-in-trade of a fairly accurate knowledge of current political issues, an appreciation of personalities, and a philosophical subrident estimate of the bubbles that are for ever rising on the political surface.  I found Finch of The Universal Review, James of The Weekly, and one or two others more than willing to give me employment.  I put my pen also at the disposal of Raggles.  It was as uplifting and about as mechanical as tax-collecting; but it involved less physical exertion and less unpleasant contact with my fellow creatures.  I could also keep the ends of my moustache waxed, which was a great consolation.