ongings as they talked. Thomas lay and
looked at them with the very blue slits that were like his father's eyes
grown old. And suddenly Peggy, looking from son to father, saw that
Peter's eyes had grown as old as Thomas's, looking wearily out of a pale,
pinched face.

Peggy's own eyes brimmed over as she bent over Thomas's night-shirt.

CHAPTER XVI

A LONG WAY

Lord Evelyn Urquhart dined with his nephew on the last evening in
February. It was a characteristic Urquhart dinner-party; the guests were
mostly cheerful, well-bred young people of high spirits and of the
worldly station that is not much concerned with any aspect of money but
the spending of it. High living, plain thinking, agreeable manners and
personal appearance, plenty of humour, enough ability to make a success
of the business of living and not enough to agitate the brain, a light
tread along a familiar and well-laid road, and a serene blindness to
side-tracks and alleys not familiar nor well-laid and to those that
walked thereon--these were the characteristics of the pleasant people
who frequented Denis Urquhart's pleasant house in Park Lane.

Lucy was among them, small and pale, and rather silent, and intensely
alive. She, of course, was a native not of Park Lane but of Chelsea; and
the people who had frequented her home there were of a different sort.
They had had, mostly, a different kind of brain, a kind more restless and
troublesome and untidy, and a different type of wit, more pungent and
ironic, less well-fed and hilarious, and they were less well-dressed and
agreeable to look at, and had (perhaps) higher thoughts (though how shall
one measure height?) and ate (certainly) plainer food, for lack of
richer. These were the people Lucy knew. Her father himself had been of
these. She now found her tent pitched among the prosperous; and the study
of them touched her wide gaze with a new, pondering look. Denis hadn't
any use for cranks. None of his set were socialists, vegetarians,
Quakers, geniuses, anarchists, drunkards, poets, anti-breakfasters, or
anti-hatters; none of them, in fine, the sort of person Lucy was used to.
They never pawned their watches or walked down Bond Street in Norfolk
coats. They had, no doubt, their hobbies; but they were suitable,
well-bred hobbies, that did not obtrude vulgarly on other people's
notice. Peter had once said that if he were a plutocrat he would begin
to dream dreams. Lucy supposed that the seemingly u