usic."

"You, of all men," she protested, "to be talking like this!"

"I mean it," he insisted, a little doggedly. "I have spent too many of
my years on the treadmill. A man was born to be either an egoist and
parcel out the earth according to his tastes, or to develop like Dartrey
into a dreamer.--Curse you!" he added, suddenly shaking his fist at the
tall towers of the Houses of Parliament. "You're like an infernal
boarding-school, with your detentions and impositions and castigations.
There must be something beyond."

"A Cabinet Minister--" she began.

"The sixth form," he interrupted. "There's just one aspiration of life
to be granted under that roof and to win it you are asked to stifle all
the rest. It isn't worth it."

"It's the greatest game at which men can play," she declared.

"And also the narrowest because it is the most absorbing," he answered.
"We have our triumphs there and they end in a chuckle. Don't you love
sunshine in winter, strange cities, pictures, pictures of another age,
pictures which take your thoughts back into another world, architecture
that is not utilitarian, the faces of human beings on whom the strain of
life has never fallen? And women--women whose eyes will laugh into
yours, who haven't a single view in life, who don't care a fig about
improving their race, who want just love, to give and to take?"

She gazed at him in astonishment, a little carried away, her eyes soft,
her lips parted.

"But you have turned pagan!" she cried.

"An instant's revolt against the methodism of life," he replied, his
feet once more upon the earth. "But the feeling's there, all the same,"
he went on doggedly. "I want to leave school. I have been there so
long. It seems to me my holiday is overdue."

She passed her arm through his. She was a very clever and a very
understanding woman.

"That comes of your having ignored us," she murmured.

"It isn't my fault if I have," he reminded her.

"In a sense it is," she insisted. "The woman in your life should be the
most beautiful part of it. You chose to make her the stepping-stone to
your ambition. Consequently you go through life hungry, you wait till
you almost starve, and then suddenly the greatest things in the world
which lie to your hand seem like baubles."

"You are hideously logical," he grumbled.

They were walking slower now, within a few yards of the entrance to her
flat. Both of them were a little disturbed,--she, full as she was wit