Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/57

Rh We seemed to be very close together then, and yet I can see now how far away from one another we were in reality. When we parted that pouring rainy night in Edgware Road I could have cried. You meant very much to me then—I thought, everything. Brought up as I had been, a passionate believer in my caste, proud of my ancestral name, a ruthless young Tory, with no redeeming feature but his equally passionate belief in the creed of Noblesse oblige, you came to me as a sort of liberator from ideas, fine enough once perhaps, but now effete and harmful. You transformed my silly pride by teaching me the rights of others to work out their own salvation. You made me doubt and deny the heaven-born certainty of the mission of my caste to "lead." You showed me the physiological absurdity of "high birth," and the ridicule of taking mere social observances seriously. And all this (and how much more!) without a hard or cruel word, merely with gentleness, tact, and the indirect influence of your beautiful, kind, and serene personality. How was it, then, that, six months after my arrival in the States, I had ceased to write to you and you to me? that in twelve months we had lost all trace of one another? that in a few years I had grown to believe that all the actual product of our friendship was the sweetness of the intercourse of two young souls? Whether