was just starting, or I don’t know what might have happened.  I said not a word; shook hands with him; got into the carriage; he waved his hat to me, and I pretended not to see him, but I did see him, and saw him turn round immediately to some well-dressed officer-like gentleman with whom he walked laughing down the platform.  The rest of that day was black to me.  I cared for nothing.  I passed away from the thought of Clem, and dwelt upon the conviction which had long possessed me that I was insignificant, that there was nothing much in me, and it was this which destroyed my peace.  We may reconcile ourselves to poverty and suffering, but few of us can endure the conviction that there is nothing in us, and that consequently we cannot expect anybody to gravitate towards us with any forceful impulse.  It is a bitter experience.  And yet there is consolation.  The universe is infinite.  In the presence of its celestial magnitudes who is there who is really great or small, and what is the difference between you and me, my work and yours?  I sought refuge in the idea of god, the God of a starry night with its incomprehensible distances; and I was at peace, content to be the meanest worm of all the millions that crawl on the earth.

CHAPTER IV—­A NECESSARY DEVELOPMENT

The few friends who have read the first part of my autobiography may perhaps remember that in my younger days I had engaged myself to a girl named Ellen, from whom afterwards I parted.  After some two or three years she was left an orphan, and came into the possession of a small property, over which unfortunately she had complete power.  She was attractive and well-educated, and I heard long after I had broken with her, and had ceased to have intercourse with Butts, that the two were married.  He of course, living so near her, had known her well, and he found her money useful.  How they agreed I knew not save by report, but I was told that after the first child was born, the only child they ever had, Butts grew indifferent to her, and that she, to use my friend’s expression, “went off,” by which I suppose he meant that she faded.  There happened in those days to live near Butts a small squire, married, but with no family.  He was a lethargic creature, about five-and-thirty years old, farming eight hundred acres of his own land.  He did not, however, belong to the farming class.  He had been to Harrow, was on the magistrates’ bench, and associated with the small aristocracy of the country round.  He was like every other squire whom I remember in my native county, and I can remember scores of them.  He read no books and tolerated the usual conventional breaches of the moral law, but was an intense worshipper of respectability, and hated a scandal.  On one point he differed from his neighbours.  He was a Whig and they were all Tories.  I have said