One Philip was an evil thing, full of lusts and horrors, lower than any beast that crawled the earth. And another Philip was quite beautiful, and Christ would have loved him. And, in addition to these two, was yet a third Philip, who stood apart from both. Philip could not make out who this third one was. He seemed to be always just behind the other two, watching them both with passionless eyes. “There are times,” so Philip explained to me, “when he looks into my very soul and I shrivel up with shame; and there are rare moments when I feel as if he had entered into me and we were one.”

From another, I might have deemed this idle talk; but Philip was a curious fellow. Much tragedy had entered his life that must have gone to the making of him; and in him the animal and spiritual were both strongly developed. Behind that veil of darkness, there must have been many a grim struggle between them. Myself I always believed in the existence of that book about which we talked that night. I was abroad when he died. On my return I spoke about it to his father and he promised to make search for it.

But we never found it.

Chapter I

BIRTH AND PARENTAGE

I was born at Walsall in Staffordshire on the 2nd of May, 1859. My father, at the time, was the owner of coal mines on Cannock Chase. They were among the first pits sunk on Cannock Chase; and are still referred to locally as the Jerome pits. My mother, whose name was Marguerite, was Welsh. She was the elder daughter of a Mr. Jones, a solicitor of Swansea; and in those days of modest fortunes had been regarded as an heiress. It was chiefly with her money that the coal-pits had been started. My mother's family were Nonconformists, and my father came of Puritan stock. I have heard my mother tell how she and her sister, when they were girls, would often have to make their way to chapel of a Sunday morning through showers of stones and mud.



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