Uncle Henry was at first inclined to be angry when Peter appeared for the second time a banished man. Peter wisely forebore trying to explain the motive of his riot.

"The fact is, Uncle, I have had enough of Oxford," he said.

"Oxford seems to have had enough of you," his uncle grumbled. "I told you to get education."

"There isn\'t any education at Oxford. It\'s in London now."

"What will you do in London?"

"I could read for the bar," Peter suggested.

"Alone in London, eh? I don\'t think so. You want a nursemaid."

"Let the mater come and keep house."

Uncle Henry reflected. "Peter," he said, "keep out of the police court. I draw the line at that."

"I shall be all right in London. Oxford annoyed me, Uncle."

"Very well. I leave it to your mother."

Peter\'s mother agreed to come to London and manage a small flat.

"I shall just love to have you, mother," Peter said to her when the plans were laid.

[Pg 134]

"I wonder?" she said, searching his face.

"You\'re not worried about this Oxford mess?"

"I\'m thinking, Peter. You\'re so terribly impatient."

Peter himself hunted out the flat and furnished it.

"Let him handle a bit of money," his uncle suggested.

Incidentally Peter learned something about the housing of people in London; something, too, of agents and speculators in housing. Finally he perched in Golder\'s Green in a small flat over a group of shops. The agent assured him it was a district loved by literary and artistic people.

His mother quickly followed him to London with plate and linen. A maid was engaged, and Peter settled down to happiness and comfort.

His first sensations were triumphant. He kicked his heels. The grey walls of Oxford fell away. He tramped the streets of London, and flung out the chest of a free man. Moreover, he had the zest of his new employment. He broke his young brains against the subtleties of the law.

Within a few weeks he began tentatively to know the intellectual firebrands of the time. He had sent his pamphlet concerning Gingerbread Fair to the distinguished author whose epistolary acquaintance he had made in Hamingburgh. The great man, who independently had heard the full story of Peter\'s assault upon the Lord Chamberlain\'s stage at Oxford, was tickled, and sent him[Pg 135] an introduction to a famous collectivist pair whose salon included everybody in London who had a theory and believed in it.

Peter met Georgian poets, independent critics and reviewers, mystics of every degree, diagrammatic and futurist painters, musicians who wrote in pentametric scales, social reformers, suspected dramatists—everybody who had proved anything, or destroyed anything, or knew how the world should be run; experts upon constitutional government in the Far East, upon beautiful conduct in garden cities, upon the incidence of taxation, upon housing and sanitation, upon sweated labour, upon sex and marriage, upon vaccination and physical culture, upon food-bases, oriental religion and Hindu poetry.

Peter did not meet all these people at once. There was............