One’s views, even at that age, are not wholly determined by one’s own momentary situation; even a boy can recognize that there is desert all round him though he, for the nonce, sits in an oasis. I was, in my ineffective way, a tenderhearted creature; perhaps the most murderous feelings I ever entertained were toward an under master at Chartres who forbade me to give to a beggar at the school gate. Add to this that my early reading—not only Wells but Sir Robert Ball—had lodged very firmly in my imagination the vastness and cold of space, the littleness of Man. It is not strange that I should
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