low, vividly green, and a fringe of blue campanula, with frail,
quivering bells, outlined all open spaces. The face of the land had
been washed by the rain. It shone with an inimitable cleanliness, as
though consciously happy in relief from all soil of dust. And it was
here, the open country stretching afar on all sides, that Dickie began
talking, not, as at first, in desultory fashion, but of matters nearly
pertaining and closely interesting to himself.

"You know," he said, as they walked the horses quietly, neck to neck,
along the moorland road, "I don't go in for system-making or for
reforms on any big scale. That doesn't come within my province. I must
leave that to politicians and to men who are in the push of the world.
I admire it. I rejoice in the hot-headed, narrow-brained, whole-hearted
agitator, who believes that his system adopted, his reform carried
through, the whole show will instantly be put straight. Such faith is
very touching."

"And the reformer has sometimes done some little good after all,"
Honoria commented.

"Of course he has!" Dickie agreed. "Only, as a rule, poor dear, he
can't be contented but that his special reform should be the final one,
that his system should be the universal panacea. And in point of fact
no reform is final this side of death, and no panacea is universal,
save that which the Maker of the Universe chooses to work out--is
working out now, if we could any way grasp it--through the slow course
of unnumbered ages. Let the reformer do all he can, but don't let him
turn sour because his pet reform, his pet system, sinks away and is
swallowed up in the great sea of things--sea of human progress, if you
like. Every system is bound to prove too small, every reform
ludicrously inadequate--be it never so radical--because material
conditions are perpetually changing, while man in his mental, emotional
and physical aspects remains always precisely the same."

They passed from the breezy upland into the high-banked lane which,
leading downwards, joins the great London and Portsmouth Road just
beyond Farley Row.

"And--and that is where I come in!" Richard said, turning a little
in the saddle and smiling sweet-temperedly, yet with a suggestion
of self-mockery, upon his companion. "Just because, in essential
respects, mankind remains--notwithstanding modifications of his
environment--substantially the same, from the era of the Pentateuch
to the era of the Rougon-Macquarts, there mu