moment, blinking in the sun, perhaps to
hide the tremor of feeling that touched for one instant the corners of
his mouth. Then he said:

"Do you remember years ago, when we were at Eastbourne and you met Uncle
Kenneth for the first time, he told me at dinner not to be a showman?
I've always remembered that remark of his, and I think it applies to one
showing off oneself as much as to showing off other people. I think
that's why I'm different from you."

Michael glanced up at this.

"You can be damned rude when you like," he murmured.

"Well, you asked me."

"So I'm a showman?" said Michael.

"Oh, for Heaven's sake don't begin to worry over it. It doesn't make any
odds to me what you are. I don't think it ever would," he added simply,
and in this avowal was all that Michael craved for. Under a sudden chill
presentiment that before long he would test this friend of his to the
last red throb of his proud heart, Michael took comfort from this
declaration and asked no more for comprehension or sympathy. Those were
shifting sands of feeling compared with this rock-hewn permanence of
Alan. He remembered the stones upon the Berkshire downs, the stolid,
unperceiving, eternal stones. Comparable to them alone stood Alan.

They had turned out of the gates of the school-ground by now, and were
strolling heedless of direction through the streets of West Kensington
that to Michael seemed all at once strangely alluring with their
display of a sedate and cosy life. He could not recall that he had ever
before been so sensitive to the atmosphere of sunlit security which was
radiated by these windows with their visions of rosy babies bobbing and
laughing, of demure and saucy maids, of polished bird-cages and pots of
daffodils. The white steps were in tune with the billowy clouds, and the
scarlet pillar-box at the corner had a friendly, human smile. It was a
doll's-house world, whose dainty offer of intimate citizenship refreshed
Michael's imagination like a child's picture-book.

He began to reflect that the opinions of Abercrombie and his friends
round the hot-water pipes were wrought out in such surroundings as
these, and he arrived gradually at a sort of compassion for them,
picturing the lives of small effort that would inevitably be their
portion. He perceived that they would bear the burden of existence in
the future, struggling to preserve their gentility against the envy of
the class beneath them and the contempt of those