that astonished and charmed me.  I said:  ‘Why are not our school histories like this?’ The owner of the book caught me.  I asked her to lend it to me, but she would not, nor would she give me any reason for declining.  Soon afterwards I left school.  I persuaded my aunt to let me join the Free Library at the Wedgwood Institution.  But the book was not in the catalogue. (How often, in exchanging volumes, did I not gaze into the reading-room, where men read the daily papers and the magazines, without daring to enter!) At length I audaciously decided to buy the book.  I ordered it, not at our regular stationer’s in Oldcastle Street, but at a little shop of the same kind in Trafalgar Road.  In three days it arrived.  I called for it, and took it home secretly in a cardboard envelope-box.  I went to bed early, and I began to read.  I read all night, thirteen hours.  O book with the misleading title—­for you have nothing to do with sociology, and you ought to have been called How to Think Honestly—­my face flushed again and again as I perused your ugly yellowish pages!  Again and again I exclaimed:  ‘But this is marvellous!’ I had not guessed that anything so honest, and so courageous, and so simple, and so convincing had ever been written.  I am capable now of suspecting that Spencer was not a supreme genius; but he taught me intellectual courage; he taught me that nothing is sacred that will not bear inspection; and I adore his memory.  The next morning after breakfast I fell asleep in a chair.  ‘My dear!’ protested Aunt Constance.  ‘Ah,’ I thought, ’if you knew, Aunt Constance, if you had the least suspicion, of the ideas that are surging and shining in my head, you would go mad—­go simply mad!’ I did not care much for deception, but I positively hated clumsy concealment, and the red book was in the house; at any moment it might be seized.  On a shelf of books in my bedroom was a novel called The Old Helmet, probably the silliest novel in the world.  I tore the pages from the binding and burnt them; I tore the binding from Spencer and burnt it; and I put my treasure in the covers of The Old Helmet.  Once Rebecca, a person privileged, took the thing away to read; but she soon brought it back.  She told me she had always understood that The Old Helmet was more, interesting than that.

Later, I discovered The Origin of Species in the Free Library.  It finished the work of corruption.  Spencer had shown me how to think; Darwin told me what to think.  The whole of my upbringing went for naught thenceforward.  I lived a double life.  I said nothing to my aunt of the miracle wrought within me, and she suspected nothing.  Strange and uncanny, is it not, that such miracles can escape the observation of a loving heart?  I loved her as much as ever, perhaps more than ever.  Thank Heaven that love can laugh at reason!