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228 merit, what he did not want to do. The so-called claims of society, so far as they did not represent anything for which he really cared, he quite simply and unaffectedly ignored. He never throughout his life belonged to a club. The drudgery of business he could not wholly escape, but he never allowed it either to absorb his time or to master his intelligence. That neglect of detail which is one of the secrets of success came to him naturally. For the intricacies of business he had no taste and little patience. "I keep fifteen clerks doing my accounts," he once observed, when inveighing against the artificial complexity of modern commerce, "and yet I cannot find out how much money I have got." If he had insisted on finding out, he might perhaps have known, but at the cost of this striking quality of detachment from routine. And for one so simple in his pleasures as he was, the routine of pleasure was as little worth its price to him as the routine of business. But with his chief friends the daily intercourse of pleasure was constant. For years a week day hardly ever passed, when he was in London, without his looking in on the Faulkners in Queen Square. At a later period the supper in the Strand on Thursday evenings, with Webb and one or two others, after the meetings of the Society for Protection of Ancient Buildings, was equally constant. His Sunday mornings at Burne-Jones's house, which only ceased with his last illness, have already been mentioned. For many years he also dined there regularly on Wednesdays: "there was no music on those evenings," is a child's recollection, "and he would read aloud."

"Once when I had been upstairs in the nursery at Kensington Square," a friend writes of a visit to Burne-Jones's house in the winter of 1866–7, "I came down and found Morris in the parlour. He was nibbing a