Page:William-morris-and-the-early-days-of-the-socialist-movement.djvu/70

Rh antithesis of a housemaid's pride. Morris invited me to help myself to a pipe and tobacco, doing so himself by way of example. The pipes were of various kinds, cherrywood, briar, and clay; he himself preferred the briar.

So here I was with William Morris in the room where he had written so many of his famous poems, and worked out so many of his famous designs. How happy I was! I felt an enchantment in the place. Morris talked of the morrow's Conference, informing me of the most recent tactics of the dissentients to carry their parliamentary resolution. He spoke without anger, but with a sense of depression.

'For the life of me,' he said, 'I can't see what possible object they can have in all this business of theirs. If they succeed (as of course they won't, this time at any rate, for we are assured of a majority), then I and our side will leave the League: and what then? We have all the speakers that count, we have the Commonweal, and I have the money—more's the pity, maybe. They will have a few penniless branches, and no object or policy to justify their existence separate from the S.D.F.It is a sheer faction racket—just such as school-boys indulge in when they split into factions in order to fight each other for no rhyme or reason, save the love of the squabble; all of which is perhaps natural enough as a means of self-development on the part of school-boys, as doubtless Herbert Spencer has taken the pains somewhere in his books to explain; but it is rather disconcerting to find foolishness of this kind among grown-up and otherwise intelligent men, masquerading as service for the Socialist cause.'

He turned then to interest me in some of his books, and explained to me the history of the Dürer wood-engravings and other prints on the walls.

May Morris now arrived. I was greatly interested to meet her; I had heard so much about her beauty and her activities in the movement. She resembled her