rude!" Really she was pathetic, that
poor devotee! The spindleberries glowed in their silver-lustre jug,
sprayed up against the sunlight. They looked triumphant--as well they
might, who stood for that which had ruined--or, was it, saved?--a life!
Alicia! She had made a pretty mess of it, and yet who knew what secret
raptures she had felt with her subtle lover, Beauty, by starlight and
sunlight and moonlight, in the fields and woods, on the hilltops, and by
riverside! Flowers, and the flight of birds, and the ripple of the wind,
and all the shifting play of light and colour which made a man despair
when he wanted to use them; she had taken them, hugged them to her with
no afterthought, and been happy! Who could say that she had missed the
prize of life? Who could say it?... Spindleberries! A bunch of
spindleberries to set such doubts astir in him! Why, what was beauty but
just the extra value which certain forms and colours, blended, gave to
things--just the extra value in the human market! Nothing else on earth,
nothing! And the spindleberries glowed against the sunlight, delicate,
remote!

Taking his palette, he mixed crimson lake, white, and ultramarine. What
was that? Who sighed, away out there behind him? Nothing!

"Damn it all!" he thought; "this is childish. This is as bad as Alicia!"
And he set to work to paint in his celebrated manner--spindleberries.

1918.

II

EXPECTATIONS

Not many years ago a couple were living in the South of England whose
name was Wotchett--Ralph and Eileen Wotchett; a curious name, derived,
Ralph asserted, from a Saxon Thegn called Otchar mentioned in Domesday,
or at all events--when search of the book had proved vain--on the edge
of that substantial record.

He--possibly the thirtieth descendant of the Thegn--was close on six
feet in height and thin, with thirsty eyes, and a smile which had fixed
itself in his cheeks, so on the verge of appearing was it. His hair
waved, and was of a dusty shade bordering on grey. His wife, of the same
age and nearly the same height as himself, was of sanguine colouring and
a Cornish family, which had held land in such a manner that it had
nearly melted in their grasp. All that had come to Eileen was a
reversion, on the mortgageable value of which she and Ralph had been
living for some time. Ralph Wotchett also had expectations. By
profession he was an architect, but perhaps because of his expectations,
he had always had bad luck. The in