ABSTRACT
Towards the end of this period of grace, two events gave shape and direction to Richards' interests. The first happened on the night of the Armistice, n November 1918, when a disturbance broke out in Cambridge. Ogden's Cambridge Magazine had supported pacifists; it did not openly embrace pacifism, but the distinction was lost sight of. Some took revenge by breaking into his shops and hurling books, pictures, and pianos into the streets. That night Ogden approached his tenant Richards in Free School Lane to ask if he could identify any of the rioters.5 He could not, but they "stopped at eleven o'clock halfway down my little twisting stairs":
somehow we stopped there and started talking about meaning. There had been an article in Mind and another play-up in, I think, the Aristotelian Society Proceedings; people had been talking about meaning and making an awful mess of it, and we'd been reading them by accident-neither of us knew the other was interested at all-and we started making comments on them. We stood there rwo hours on the stairway till one o'clock. I can remember a bats-wing gas burner above my head. This was out of kilter and every little while it squealed and I would reach up and try to adjust the tap of the burner. We went on and on, and the whole of our book, The Meaning o/ Meaning, was talked out clearly in rwo hours.6
