in a newspaper, upon which a Leading
Article sits, dutifully arousing the fat worm of sarcastic humour under
the ribs of cradled citizens, with an exposure of its excellent folly.
He would not have it laughed at; still he could not admit it as more
than a skirt of the robe of his Idea. For let none think him a mere City
merchant, millionnaire, boon-fellow, or music-loving man of the world.
He had ideas to shoot across future Ages;--provide against the shrinkage
of our Coal-beds; against, and for, if you like, the thickening,
jumbling, threatening excess of population in these Islands, in Europe,
America, all over our habitable sphere. Now that Mrs. Burman, on her
way to bliss, was no longer the dungeon-cell for the man he would
show himself to be, this name for successes, corporate nucleus of the
enjoyments, this Victor Montgomery Radnor, intended impressing himself
upon the world as a factory of ideas. Colney's insolent charge, that
the English have no imagination--a doomed race, if it be true!--would
be confuted. For our English require but the lighted leadership to come
into cohesion, and step ranked, and chant harmoniously the song of their
benevolent aim. And that astral head giving, as a commencement, example
of the right use of riches, the nation is one, part of the riddle of the
future solved.

Surely he had here the Idea? He had it so warmly, that his bath-water
heated. Only the vision was wanted.

On London Bridge he had seen it--a great thing done to the flash of
brilliant results. That was after a fall.

There had been a fall also of the scheme of Lakelands.

Come to us with no superstitious whispers of indications and
significations in the fall!--But there had certainly been a moral fall,
fully to the level of the physical, in the maintaining of that scheme of
Lakelands, now ruined by his incomprehensible Nesta--who had saved him
from falling further. His bath-water chilled. He jumped out and rubbed
furiously with his towels and flesh-brushes, chasing the Idea for simple
warmth, to have Something inside him, to feel just that sustainment;
with the cry: But no one can say I do not love my Nataly! And he tested
it to prove it by his readiness to die for her: which is heroically
easier than the devotedly living, and has a weight of evidence in our
internal Courts for surpassing the latter tedious performance.

His Nesta had knocked Lakelands to pieces. Except for the making
of money, the whole year of an