Page:HG Wells--secret places of the heart.djvu/214

202 out of me as my work went on was the lack of any real fellowship in what I was doing. It was the pressure of the opposition in the Committee, day after day. It was being up against men who didn’t reason against me but who just showed by everything they did that the things I wanted to achieve didn’t matter to them one rap. It was going back to a home, lunching in clubs, reading papers, going about a world in which all the organization, all the possibility of the organization I dream of is tacitly denied. I don’t know if it seems an extraordinary confession of weakness to you, but that steady refusal of the majority of my Committee to come into co-operation with me has beaten me—or at any rate has come very near to beating me. Most of them you know are such able men. You can feel their knowledge and commonsense. They, and everybody about me, seemed busy and intent upon more immediate things, that seemed more real to them than this remote, theoretical, priggish end I have set for myself....”

He paused.

“Go on,” said Miss Grammont. “I think I understand this.”

“And yet I know I am right.”

“I know you are right. I’m certain. Go on.

“If one of those ten thousand members of the Sokol Society had thrown back his brown cloak and shown red when all the others still kept them-