back! The wood, very thick, very large,
very black, no sun--very still, and the great house behind it, huge and
white, with long gardens and green lawns and peacocks, and the Grand
Duke, with his powdered wig, and diamond-buckled shoes, his gorgeous
suit, his jewelled sword, his snuff and his wine, his silly little
dried-up yellow face.

"Then the rabble--dirty, smelling, ill-conditioned fellows--breaking
through the silence, tearing up the Wood, knocking down the palace,
hanging the Grand Duke from a tree, last of all, setting the whole thing
into the most splendid blaze!... Oh! of course that wasn't Shelley's
context--_his_ was all about boiling a kettle or something--but that's
the way I saw it--just like that." Nothing stirred Brun like the sound
of his own voice and now he was getting very excited indeed and was
waving his hands.

"Yes," said Christopher placidly. "Very dramatic. What does it all
mean?"

"Well, this. It seems to me that that's just what's been happening over
here. Your Duchess is dead and instead there is to-night's crowd. The
Grand Duke is gone and all that was his--now for the fires!"

Christopher, filling his pipe, paused, and then, his voice grave and
serious: "Romantics aside, Brun, for a minute. Do you remember your
Tiger idea you delivered to me once? I've often thought of it since. You
said then that the reason why the Duchess and her times--the Grand Duke
and his wood--had got to go was because their policy had been to give
the Tigers of the world no liberty--to pretend indeed that they weren't
there, and that now the time had come when every man should declare his
Tiger, should give it liberty and, whether he restrained it or no,
acknowledge its existence.... Well, now--what I want to know is this.
What to your thinking is going to come of it all? I'm old-fashioned. I
like the old settled laws and customs and the rest of it, and yet I'm
not afraid of this new Individualism; but what I expect and what you
expect to come of it all are sure to be mightily different things."

"They are," said Brun, laughing. "You see, Christopher, as I've often
said to you before, you're a sentimentalist--people matter to you;
you're concerned in their individual good or bad luck. Now none of that
is worth anything to me. I observe from the outside--always. What I want
to see is less muddle, more brain, less waste of time, more progress. I
believe the loosing of the Tiger is going to bring that about. T