ase in the pleasures of life.

We drank tea, ate sandwiches, cheered our hearts with champagne cup,
chattered loudly, and, the men of the party, stretched our legs for half
an hour. Then we settled down again to gape at Tim's moving figures. The
new mirrors were well worth the money I spent on them. The thing worked
better, far better, than when I saw it in the barn. I think the audience
was greatly pleased. Everybody said so to me when the time came for
escape from the hall.

Mrs. Ascher and I drove back to Hampstead together. I told her how
Ascher had left the hall and that it might be late before he got home.
She sat silent beside me and I thought that she was wondering what had
happened to her husband. Just before we reached the house she spoke, and
I discovered that she had all the time been thinking of something else,
not Ascher's absence.

"I was wrong," she said, "in condemning the cinematograph and this new
invention. It is--at present it is vile beyond words, vile as I thought
it; but I see now that there are possibilities."

"May I tell Tim that?" I said. "It would cheer him greatly. The poor
boy has never really got over what you said to him in New York, about
blasphemy, you know."

"You may tell him," said Mrs. Ascher, "that his invention is capable of
being used for the ends of art; that he has created a mechanical body
and that _we_, the artists, must breathe into it the breath of life."

We reached the house.

"I am coming in, if I may," I said. "Mr. Ascher asked me to see him
to-night if possible. I promised to wait for him even if he does not get
home till very late."

"I shall not sit up with you," said Mrs. Ascher. "I want to be alone to
think. I want to discover the way in which art is to take possession of
mechanics, how it is to inspire all new discoveries, to raise them from
the level of material things up and up to the mountain tops of beautiful
emotion."

"I shall tell Tim that," I said. "He'll be awfully pleased."

Mrs. Ascher held my hand, bidding me an impressive good-night.

"There is a spirit," she said, "which moves among the multitudinous
blind gropings of humanity. It moves all unseen and unknown by men,
guiding their pitiful endeavours to the Great End. That End is Duty.
That spirit is Art. To recognise it is Faith."

The Irish bishop who attended my party is a liberal and highly educated
churchman. He once told me about a Spirit which moves very much as Mrs.
Ascher's do