haw.... But what could you
have expected?"

"I've been trying to find out and understand what people are thinking. I
want ideas."

"It's disheartening, isn't it?"

"It's--perplexing sometimes."

"You go to meetings, and try to get to the bottom of Movements, and you
want to meet and know the people who write the wonderful things? Get at
the wonderful core of it?"

"One feels there are things going on."

"Great illuminating things."

"Well--yes."

"And when you see those great Thinkers and Teachers and Guides and Brave
Spirits and High Brows generally----"

He laughed and stopped just in time on the very verge of taking
pheasant.

"Oh, take it away," he cried sharply.

"We've all been through that illusion, Lady Harman," he went on.

"But I don't like to think----Aren't Great Men after all--great?"

"In their ways, in their places--Yes. But not if you go up to them and
look at them. Not at the dinner table, not in their beds.... What a time
of disillusionment you must have had!

"You see, Lady Harman," he said, leaning back from his empty plate,
inclining himself confidentially to her ear and speaking in a privy
tone; "it's in the very nature of things that we--if I may put myself
into the list--we ideologists, should be rather exceptionally loose and
untrustworthy and disappointing men. Rotters--to speak plain
contemporary English. If you come to think of it, it has to be so."

"But----" she protested.

He met her eye firmly. "It has to be."

"Why?"

"The very qualities that make literature entertaining, vigorous,
inspiring, revealing, wonderful, beautiful and--all that sort of thing,
make its producers--if you will forgive the word again--rotters."

She smiled and lifted her eyebrows protestingly.

"Sensitive nervous tissue," he said with a finger up to emphasize his
words. "Quick responsiveness to stimulus, a vivid, almost
uncontrollable, expressiveness; that's what you want in your literary
man."

"Yes," said Lady Harman following cautiously. "Yes, I suppose it is."

"Can you suppose for a moment that these things conduce to self-control,
to reserve, to consistency, to any of the qualities of a trustworthy
man?... Of course you can't. And so we _aren't_ trustworthy, we _aren't_
consistent. Our virtues are our vices.... _My_ life," said Mr. Wilkins
still more confidentially, "won't bear examination. But that's by the
way. It need not concern us now."

"But Mr. Brumley?" she asked on the