As the affairs of one drunken tailor’s family could not afford me complete occupation for my leisure hours, I began to find myself insensibly drawn by Campion’s unreflecting enthusiasm into all kinds of small duties connected with Barbara’s Building.  Before I could realise that I had consented, I discovered myself in charge of an evening class of villainous-looking and uncleanly youths who assembled in one of the lecture-rooms to listen to my recollections of the history of England.  I was to continue the course begun by a young Oxford man, who, for some reason or other, had migrated from Barbara’s Building to Toynbee Hall.

“I’ve never done any schoolmastering in my life.  Suppose,” said I, with vivid recollections of my school days, “suppose they rag me?”

“They won’t,” said Campion, who had come to introduce me to the class.

And they did not.  I found these five and twenty youthful members of the proletariat the most attentive, respectable, and intelligent audience that ever listened to a lecture.  Gradually I came to perceive that they were not as villainous-looking and uncleanly as at first sight I had imagined.  A great many of them took notes.  When I came to the end of my dissertation on Henry VIII, I went among them, as I discovered the custom to be, and chatted, answering questions, explaining difficulties, and advising as to a course of reading.  The atmosphere of trust and friendliness compensated for the lack of material sweetness.  Here were young men pathetically eager to learn, grateful for every crumb of information that came from my lips.  They reminded me of nothing more than the ragged class of scholars around a teacher in a mediaeval university.  Some had vague dreams of eventually presenting themselves for examinations, the Science and Art Department, the College of Preceptors, the Matriculation of the University of London.  Others longed for education for its own sake, or rather as a means of raising themselves in the social scale.  Others, bitten by the crude Socialism of their class, had been persuaded to learn something of past movements of mankind so as to obtain some basis for their opinions.  All were in deadly earnest.  The magnetic attraction between teacher and taught established itself.  After one or two lectures, I looked forward to the next with excited interest.

Other things Campion off-handedly put into my charge.  I went on tours of inspection round the houses of his competing housewives.  I acted as his deputy at the police court when ladies and gentlemen with a good record at Barbara’s got into trouble with the constabulary.  I investigated cases for the charity of the institution.  In quite a short time I realised with a gasp that I had become part of the machinery of Barbara’s Building, and was remorselessly and helplessly whirled hither and thither with the rest of the force of the driving wheel which was Rex Campion.