y. Let's go and have a look at him. How is he? Deflated?"

"Just about quarter full. That last oil glaze of yours holds the gas
something beautiful. He's not lost a cubic metre a week."...

Cothope returned to Socialism as we went toward the sheds.

"Glad to think you're a Socialist, sir," he said, "it's the only
civilised state. I been a Socialist some years--off the Clarion. It's a
rotten scramble, this world. It takes the things we make and invent and
it plays the silly fool with 'em. We scientific people, we'll have to
take things over and stop all this financing and advertisement and that.
It's too silly. It's a noosance. Look at us!"

Lord Roberts B, even in his partially deflated condition in his shed,
was a fine thing to stare up at. I stood side by side with Cothope
regarding him, and it was borne in upon me more acutely than ever that
all this had to end. I had a feeling just like the feeling of a boy who
wants to do wrong, that I would use up the stuff while I had it before
the creditors descended. I had a queer fancy, too, I remember, that if I
could get into the air it would advertise my return to Beatrice.

"We'll fill her," I said concisely.

"It's all ready," said Cothope, and added as an afterthought, "unless
they cut off the gas."...

I worked and interested myself with Cothope all the morning and for a
time forgot my other troubles. But the thought of Beatrice flooded me
slowly and steadily. It became an unintelligent sick longing to see her.
I felt that I could not wait for the filling of Lord Roberts B, that I
must hunt her up and see her soon. I got everything forward and lunched
with Cothope, and then with the feeblest excuses left him in order to
prowl down through the woods towards Bedley Corner. I became a prey to
wretched hesitations and diffidence. Ought I to go near her now? I asked
myself, reviewing all the social abasements of my early years. At
last, about five, I called at the Dower House. I was greeted by their
Charlotte--with a forbidding eye and a cold astonishment.

Both Beatrice and Lady Osprey were out.

There came into my head some prowling dream of meeting her. I went along
the lane towards Woking, the lane down which we had walked five months
ago in the wind and rain.

I mooned for a time in our former footsteps, then swore and turned back
across the fields, and then conceived a distaste for Cothope and went
Downward. At last I found myself looking down on the huge aba