nted by his general sentiments about life, but asked the most
direct questions about his occupation and his activities. His chief
occupation was being the well provided heir of a capable lawyer, and
his activities in the light of her inquiries struck him as being light
and a trifle amateurish, qualities he had never felt as any drawback
about them before. So that he had to rely rather upon aspirations and
the possibility, under proper inspiration, of a more actively
serviceable life in future.

"There's a feeling in the States," he said, "that we've had rather a
tendency to overdo work, and that there is scope for a leisure class to
develop the refinement and the wider meanings of life."

"But a leisure class doesn't mean a class that does nothing," said
Cecily. "It only means a class that isn't busy in business."

"You're too hard on me," said Mr. Direck with that quiet smile of his.

And then by way of putting her on the defensive he asked her what she
thought a man in his position ought to do.

"_Something_," she said, and in the expansion of this vague demand they
touched on a number of things. She said that she was a Socialist, and
there was still in Mr. Direck's composition a streak of the
old-fashioned American prejudice against the word. He associated
Socialists with Anarchists and deported aliens. It was manifest too that
she was deeply read in the essays and dissertations of Mr. Britling. She
thought everybody, man or woman, ought to be chiefly engaged in doing
something definite for the world at large. ("There's my secretaryship of
the Massachusetts Modern Thought Society, anyhow," said Mr. Direck.) And
she herself wanted to be doing something--it was just because she did
not know what it was she ought to be doing that she was reading so
extensively and voraciously. She wanted to lose herself in something.
Deep in the being of Mr. Direck was the conviction that what she ought
to be doing was making love in a rapturously egotistical manner, and
enjoying every scrap of her own delightful self and her own delightful
vitality--while she had it, but for the purposes of their conversation
he did not care to put it any more definitely than to say that he
thought we owed it to ourselves to develop our personalities. Upon which
she joined issue with great vigour.

"That is just what Mr. Britling says about you in his 'American
Impressions,'" she said. "He says that America overdoes the development
of personaliti