fried
herring and a pint of porter. Fashionable life, too, I have to represent
at some length, in order to show my hero under all circumstances. Lady
Theo Bingham Bingley, whose bay mare he had the good fortune to stop,
is the daughter of a very fine old Tory peer. I'm going to describe the
kind of parties I once went to--the fashionable intellectuals, you know,
who like to have the latest book on their tables. They give parties,
river parties, parties where you play games. There's no difficulty in
conceiving incidents; the difficulty is to put them into shape--not to
get run away with, as Lady Theo was. It ended disastrously for her, poor
woman, for the book, as I planned it, was going to end in profound and
sordid respectability. Disowned by her father, she marries my hero, and
they live in a snug little villa outside Croydon, in which town he is
set up as a house agent. He never succeeds in becoming a real gentleman
after all. That's the interesting part of it. Does it seem to you the
kind of book you'd like to read?" he enquired; "or perhaps you'd like my
Stuart tragedy better," he continued, without waiting for her to answer
him. "My idea is that there's a certain quality of beauty in the past,
which the ordinary historical novelist completely ruins by his absurd
conventions. The moon becomes the Regent of the Skies. People clap spurs
to their horses, and so on. I'm going to treat people as though they
were exactly the same as we are. The advantage is that, detached from
modern conditions, one can make them more intense and more abstract then
people who live as we do."

Rachel had listened to all this with attention, but with a certain
amount of bewilderment. They both sat thinking their own thoughts.

"I'm not like Hirst," said Hewet, after a pause; he spoke meditatively;
"I don't see circles of chalk between people's feet. I sometimes wish I
did. It seems to me so tremendously complicated and confused. One can't
come to any decision at all; one's less and less capable of making
judgments. D'you find that? And then one never knows what any one feels.
We're all in the dark. We try to find out, but can you imagine anything
more ludicrous than one person's opinion of another person? One goes
along thinking one knows; but one really doesn't know."

As he said this he was leaning on his elbow arranging and rearranging
in the grass the stones which had represented Rachel and her aunts
at luncheon. He was speaking as