A Girl Among the Anarchists | Page 5

at a loss indeed. We had no relatives living of our father's; our mother's family we had never known, and they were too distant to be practically available. Our father's friends were not such as to be of much help to us. Cat enthusiasts and scientific dreamers are all very well in their way, but they almost always take far more than they give in the mart of friendship. The old professor had preceded my father to his grave.
Our father left us comfortably off. The house was our own, and property yielding a comfortable income was divided equally between us. Our home seemed desolate indeed without our father, and very gloomily did the first months of his absence pass; but in time hope and youth reasserted themselves and we gradually settled down to much our old way of life. Caroline obtained several engagements and was still studying enthusiastically. Raymond passed most of his time at the hospital, where he had rooms, though he frequently came home; I was the only one who had not a definite occupation. I read a great deal and wrote a little also, chiefly studies on historical subjects which interested me, but I had printed nothing. In fact I had never been in the way of the literary world, and did not know how to set about it. Time used often to hang rather heavily on my hands in the big house where I was generally alone. I was the housekeeper, but such cares did not take up much of my time. The result of so much solitude and lack of occupation was that I became restless and dissatisfied. Mere reading without any definite object did not and could not suffice me; to write when there seemed no prospect of ever being read, and keenly alive as I was to my own deficiencies, did not attract me; friends I might say I had none, for the few people my father knew were interested in him and not in us children, and ceased to frequent our house after his death. Caroline's musical friends did not appeal to me, so that the whole interest of my life was centred round my brother. When he came home we used always to be together, and conversation never flagged. Never having been to school he had none of the schoolboy's patronising contempt for a sister. We had always been chums and companions, and so we continued, but whereas, as children, it was I, with my more passionate and enterprising nature, who took the lead, now it was he who, mixing with the outer world, provided the stimulus of new ideas and fresh activities for which I craved. Brought suddenly face to face, after the studious seclusion of home, with the hard facts of life as seen in a London hospital, he had begun to take a deep interest in social questions. The frightful havoc of life and happiness necessitated by the economic conditions of nineteenth-century society, impressed him deeply, and he felt that any doctor who looked upon his profession as other than a mere means to make money must tackle such problems. Following up this line of thought he became interested in economics and labour questions. His views were the result of no mere surface impression, but the logical outcome of thought and study, and he arrived at socialism by mental processes of his own, uninfluenced by the ordinary channels of propaganda. I shared his interests and read on parallel lines. We had no friends in Socialist circles, no personal interest of any kind balanced our judgment. The whole trend of our education had been to make independent thinkers of us. What we saw in the whole problem was a question of justice, and for this we were ready and anxious to work. A new interest was thus brought into our lives, which, in my case, soon became all-absorbing. I was always begging my brother to bring me home fresh books. The driest volumes of political economy, the most indigestible of philosophical treatises, nothing came amiss. From these I passed on to more modern works. Raymond had made friends with a student who was a professed socialist and through him he came into possession of a number of pamphlets and papers, all of which I devoured eagerly, and some of which made a lasting impression on my mind. Krapotkin's "Appeal to the Young" was of this number. I remember in my enthusiasm reading it aloud to my sister Caroline, who, however, took scant interest in such matters, and who tried, but in vain, to put a damper on my enthusiasm.
I was always fond of scribbling, and the outcome of all this reading was that I, too, flew to pen and paper. I used to read my papers to Raymond on