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полная версияThe Secret Places of the Heart

Герберт Джордж Уэллс
The Secret Places of the Heart

Полная версия

But this action had scarcely the effect he had intended it to have. It set the young lady who was called Belinda asking about ways and means of getting to Salisbury; it brought to light the distressing fact that V.V. had the beginnings of a chafed heel. Once he had set things going they moved much too quickly for the doctor to deflect their course. He found himself called upon to make personal sacrifices to facilitate the painless transport of the two ladies to Salisbury, where their luggage awaited them at the Old George Hotel. In some way too elusive to trace, it became evident that he and Sir Richmond were to stay at this same Old George Hotel. The luggage was to be shifted to the top of the coupe, the young lady called V.V. was to share the interior of the car with Sir Richmond, while the lady named Belinda, for whom Dr. Martineau was already developing a very strong dislike, was to be thrust into an extreme proximity with him and the balance of the luggage in the dicky seat behind.

Sir Richmond had never met with a young woman with a genuine historical imagination before, and he was evidently very greatly excited and resolved to get the utmost that there was to be got out of this encounter.

Section 3

Sir Richmond displayed a complete disregard of the sufferings of Dr. Martineau, shamefully compressed behind him. Of these he was to hear later. He ran his overcrowded little car, overcrowded so far as the dicky went, over the crest of the Down and down into Amesbury and on to Salisbury, stopping to alight and stretch the legs of the party when they came in sight of Old Sarum.

“Certainly they can do with a little stretching,” said Dr. Martineau grimly.

This charming young woman had seized upon the imagination of Sir Richmond to the temporary exclusion of all other considerations. The long Downland gradients, quivering very slightly with the vibration of the road, came swiftly and easily to meet and pass the throbbing little car as he sat beside her and talked to her. He fell into that expository manner which comes so easily to the native entertaining the visitor from abroad.

“In England, it seems to me there are four main phases of history. Four. Avebury, which I would love to take you to see to-morrow. Stonehenge. Old Sarum, which we shall see in a moment as a great grassy mound on our right as we come over one of these crests. Each of them represents about a thousand years. Old Sarum was Keltic; it, saw the Romans and the Saxons through, and for a time it was a Norman city. Now it is pasture for sheep. Latest as yet is Salisbury, – English, real English. It may last a few centuries still. It is little more than seven hundred years old. But when I think of those great hangars back there by Stonehenge, I feel that the next phase is already beginning. Of a world one will fly to the ends of, in a week or so. Our world still. Our people, your people and mine, who are going to take wing so soon now, were made in all these places. We are visiting the old homes. I am glad I came back to it just when you were doing the same thing.”

“I’m lucky to have found a sympathetic fellow traveller,” she said; “with a car.”

“You’re the first American I’ve ever met whose interest in history didn’t seem – ” He sought for an inoffensive word.

“Silly? Oh! I admit it. It’s true of a lot of us. Most of us. We come over to Europe as if it hadn’t anything to do with us except to supply us with old pictures and curios generally. We come sight-seeing. It’s romantic. It’s picturesque. We stare at the natives – like visitors at a Zoo. We don’t realize that we belong… I know our style… But we aren’t all like that. Some of us are learning a bit better than that. We have one or two teachers over there to lighten our darkness. There’s Professor Breasted for instance. He comes sometimes to my father’s house. And there’s James Harvey Robinson and Professor Hutton Webster. They’ve been trying to restore our memory.”

“I’ve never heard of any of them,” said Sir Richmond.

“You hear so little of America over here. It’s quite a large country and all sorts of interesting things happen there nowadays. And we are waking up to history. Quite fast. We shan’t always be the most ignorant people in the world. We are beginning to realize that quite a lot of things happened between Adam and the Mayflower that we ought to be told about. I allow it’s a recent revival. The United States has been like one of those men you read about in the papers who go away from home and turn up in some distant place with their memories gone. They’ve forgotten what their names were or where they lived or what they did for a living; they’ve forgotten everything that matters. Often they have to begin again and settle down for a long time before their memories come back. That’s how it has been with us. Our memory is just coming back to us.”

“And what do you find you are?”

“Europeans. Who came away from kings and churches-@-and Corinthian capitals.”

“You feel all this country belongs to you?”

“As much as it does to you.” Sir Richmond smiled radiantly at her. “But if I say that America belongs to me as much as it does to you?”

“We are one people,” she said.

“We?”

“Europe. These parts of Europe anyhow. And ourselves.”

“You are the most civilized person I’ve met for weeks and weeks.”

“Well, you are the first civilized person I’ve met in Europe for a long time. If I understand you.”

“There are multitudes of reasonable, civilized people in Europe.”

“I’ve heard or seen very little of them.

“They’re scattered, I admit.”

“And hard to find.”

“So ours is a lucky meeting. I’ve wanted a serious talk to an American for some time. I want to know very badly what you think you are up to with the world, – our world.”

“I’m equally anxious to know what England thinks she is doing. Her ways recently have been a little difficult to understand. On any hypothesis – that is honourable to her.”

“H’m,” said Sir Richmond.

“I assure you we don’t like it. This Irish business. We feel a sort of ownership in England. It’s like finding your dearest aunt torturing the cat.”

“We must talk of that,” said Sir Richmond.

“I wish you would.”

“It is a cat and a dog – and they have been very naughty animals. And poor Aunt Britannia almost deliberately lost her temper. But I admit she hits about in a very nasty fashion.”

“And favours the dog.”

“She does.”

“I want to know all you admit.”

“You shall. And incidentally my friend and I may have the pleasure of showing you Salisbury and Avebury. If you are free?”

“We’re travelling together, just we two. We are wandering about the south of England on our way to Falmouth. Where I join a father in a few days’ time, and I go on with him to Paris. And if you and your friend are coming to the Old George – ”

“We are,” said Sir Richmond.

“I see no great scandal in talking right on to bedtime. And seeing Avebury to-morrow. Why not? Perhaps if we did as the Germans do and gave our names now, it might mitigate something of the extreme informality of our behaviour.”

“My name is Hardy. I’ve been a munition manufacturer. I was slightly wounded by a stray shell near Arras while I was inspecting some plant I had set up, and also I was hit by a stray knighthood. So my name is now Sir Richmond Hardy. My friend is a very distinguished Harley Street physician. Chiefly nervous and mental cases. His name is Dr. Martineau. He is quite as civilized as I am. He is also a philosophical writer. He is really a very wise and learned man indeed. He is full of ideas. He’s stimulated me tremendously. You must talk to him.”

Sir Richmond glanced over his shoulder at the subject of these commendations. Through the oval window glared an expression of malignity that made no impression whatever on his preoccupied mind.

“My name,” said the young lady, “is Grammont. The war whirled me over to Europe on Red Cross work and since the peace I’ve been settling up things and travelling about Europe. My father is rather a big business man in New York.”

“The oil Grammont?”

“He is rather deep in oil, I believe. He is coming over to Europe because he does not like the way your people are behaving in Mesopotamia. He is on his way to Paris now. Paris it seems is where everything is to be settled against you. Belinda is a sort of companion I have acquired for the purposes of independent travel. She was Red Cross too. I must have somebody and I cannot bear a maid. Her name is Belinda Seyffert. From Philadelphia originally. You have that? Seyffert, Grammont?”

“And Hardy?”

“Sir Richmond and Dr. Martineau.”

“And – Ah! – That great green bank there just coming into sight must be Old Sarum. The little ancient city that faded away when Salisbury lifted its spire into the world. We will stop here for a little while…”

Then it was that Dr. Martineau was grim about the stretching of his legs.

Section 4

The sudden prospect which now opened out before Sir Richmond of talking about history and suchlike topics with a charming companion for perhaps two whole days instead of going on with this tiresome, shamefaced, egotistical business of self-examination was so attractive to him that it took immediate possession of his mind, to the entire exclusion and disregard of Dr. Martineau’s possible objections to any such modification of their original programme. When they arrived in Salisbury, the doctor did make some slight effort to suggest a different hotel from that in which the two ladies had engaged their rooms, but on the spur of the moment and in their presence he could produce no sufficient reason for refusing the accommodation the Old George had ready for him. He was reduced to a vague: “We don’t want to inflict ourselves – ” He could not get Sir Richmond aside for any adequate expression of his feelings about Miss Seyffert, before the four of them were seated together at tea amidst the mediaeval modernity of the Old George smoking-room. And only then did he begin to realize the depth and extent of the engagements to which Sir Richmond had committed himself.

 

“I was suggesting that we run back to Avebury to-morrow,” said Sir Richmond. “These ladies were nearly missing it.”

The thing took the doctor’s breath away. For the moment he could say nothing. He stared over his tea-cup dour-faced. An objection formulated itself very slowly. “But that dicky,” he whispered.

His whisper went unnoted. Sir Richmond was talking of the completeness of Salisbury. From the very beginning it had been a cathedral city; it was essentially and purely that. The church at its best, in the full tide of its mediaeval ascendancy, had called it into being. He was making some extremely loose and inaccurate generalizations about the buildings and ruins each age had left for posterity, and Miss Grammont was countering with equally unsatisfactory qualifications. “Our age will leave the ruins of hotels,” said Sir Richmond. “Railway arches and hotels.”

“Baths and aqueducts,” Miss Grammont compared. “Rome of the Empire comes nearest to it…”

As soon as tea was over, Dr. Martineau realized, they meant to walk round and about Salisbury. He foresaw that walk with the utmost clearness. In front and keeping just a little beyond the range of his intervention, Sir Richmond would go with Miss Grammont; he himself and Miss Seyffert would bring up the rear. “If I do,” he muttered, “I’ll be damned!” an unusually strong expression for him.

“You said – ?” asked Miss Seyffert.

“That I have some writing to do – before the post goes,” said the doctor brightly.

“Oh! come and see the cathedral!” cried Sir Richmond with ill-concealed dismay. He was, if one may put it in such a fashion, not looking at Miss Seyffert in the directest fashion when he said this.

“I’m afraid,” said the doctor mulishly. “Impossible.”

(With the unspoken addition of, “You try her for a bit.”)

Miss Grammont stood up. Everybody stood up. “We can go first to look for shops,” she said. “There’s those things you want to buy, Belinda; a fountain pen and the little books. We can all go together as far as that. And while you are shopping, if you wouldn’t mind getting one or two things for me…”

It became clear to Dr. Martineau that Sir Richmond was to be let off Belinda. It seemed abominably unjust. And it was also clear to him that he must keep closely to his own room or he might find Miss Seyffert drifting back alone to the hotel and eager to resume with him…

Well, a quiet time in his room would not be disagreeable. He could think over his notes…

But in reality he thought over nothing but the little speeches he would presently make to Sir Richmond about the unwarrantable, the absolutely unwarrantable, alterations that were being made without his consent in their common programme…

For a long time Sir Richmond had met no one so interesting and amusing as this frank-minded young woman from America. “Young woman” was how he thought of her; she didn’t correspond to anything so prim and restrained and extensively reserved and withheld as a “young lady “; and though he judged her no older than five and twenty, the word “girl” with its associations of virginal ignorances, invisible purdah, and trite ideas newly discovered, seemed even less appropriate for her than the word “boy.” She had an air of having in some obscure way graduated in life, as if so far she had lived each several year of her existence in a distinctive and conclusive manner with the utmost mental profit and no particular tarnish or injury. He could talk with her as if he talked with a man like himself – but with a zest no man could give him.

It was evident that the good things she had said at first came as the natural expression of a broad stream of alert thought; they were no mere display specimens from one of those jackdaw collections of bright things so many clever women waste their wits in accumulating. She was not talking for effect at all, she was talking because she was tremendously interested in her discovery of the spectacle of history, and delighted to find another person as possessed as she was.

Belinda having been conducted to her shops, the two made their way through the bright evening sunlight to the compact gracefulness of the cathedral. A glimpse through a wrought-iron gate of a delightful garden of spring flowers, alyssum, aubrietia, snow-upon-the-mountains, daffodils, narcissus and the like, held them for a time, and then they came out upon the level, grassy space, surrounded by little ripe old houses, on which the cathedral stands. They stood for some moments surveying it.

“It’s a perfect little lady of a cathedral,” said Sir Richmond. “But why, I wonder, did we build it?”

“Your memory ought to be better than mine,” she said, with her half-closed eyes blinking up at the sunlit spire sharp against the blue. “I’ve been away for so long-over there-that I forget altogether. Why DID we build it?”

She had fallen in quite early with this freak of speaking and thinking as if he and she were all mankind. It was as if her mind had been prepared for it by her own eager exploration in Europe. “My friend, the philosopher,” he had said, “will not have it that we are really the individuals we think we are. You must talk to him – he is a very curious and subtle thinker. We are just thoughts in the Mind of the Race, he says, passing thoughts. We are – what does he call it? – Man on his Planet, taking control of life.”

“Man and woman,” she had amended.

But just as man on his planet taking control of life had failed altogether to remember why the ditch at Avebury was on the inside instead of the outside of the vallum, so now Miss Grammont and Sir Richmond found very great difficulty in recalling why they had built Salisbury Cathedral.

“We built temples by habit and tradition,” said Sir Richmond. “But the impulse was losing its force.”

She looked up at the spire and then at him with a faintly quizzical expression.

But he had his reply ready.

“We were beginning to feel our power over matter. We were already very clever engineers. What interested us here wasn’t the old religion any more. We wanted to exercise and display our power over stone. We made it into reeds and branches. We squirted it up in all these spires and pinnacles. The priest and his altar were just an excuse. Do you think people have ever feared and worshipped in this – this artist’s lark – as they did in Stonehenge?”

“I certainly do not remember that I ever worshipped here,” she said.

Sir Richmond was in love with his idea. “The spirit of the Gothic cathedrals,” he said, “is the spirit of the sky-scrapers. It is architecture in a mood of flaming ambition. The Freemasons on the building could hardly refrain from jeering at the little priest they had left down below there, performing antiquated puerile mysteries at his altar. He was just their excuse for doing it all.”

“Sky-scrapers?” she conceded. “An early display of the sky-scraper spirit… You are doing your best to make me feel thoroughly at home.”

“You are more at home here still than in that new country of ours over the Atlantic. But it seems to me now that I do begin to remember building this cathedral and all the other cathedrals we built in Europe… It was the fun of building made us do it…”

“H’m,” she said. “And my sky-scrapers?”

“Still the fun of building. That is the thing I envy most about America. It’s still large enough, mentally and materially, to build all sorts of things… Over here, the sites are frightfully crowded…”

“And what do you think we are building now? And what do you think you are building over here?”

“What are we building now? I believe we have almost grown up. I believe it is time we began to build in earnest. For good…”

“But are we building anything at all?”

“A new world.”

“Show it me,” she said.

“We’re still only at the foundations,” said Sir Richmond. “Nothing shows as yet.”

“I wish I could believe they were foundations.”

“But can you doubt we are scrapping the old?..”

It was too late in the afternoon to go into the cathedral, so they strolled to and fro round and about the west end and along the path under the trees towards the river, exchanging their ideas very frankly and freely about the things that had recently happened to the world and what they thought they ought to be doing in it.

Section 5

After dinner our four tourists sat late and talked in a corner of the smoking-room. The two ladies had vanished hastily at the first dinner gong and reappeared at the second, mysteriously and pleasantly changed from tweedy pedestrians to indoor company. They were quietly but definitely dressed, pretty alterations had happened to their coiffure, a silver band and deep red stones lit the dusk of Miss Grammont’s hair and a necklace of the same colourings kept the peace between her jolly sun-burnt cheek and her soft untanned neck. It was evident her recent uniform had included a collar of great severity. Miss Seyffert had revealed a plump forearm and proclaimed it with a clash of bangles. Dr. Martineau thought her evening throat much too confidential.

The conversation drifted from topic to topic. It had none of the steady continuity of Sir Richmond’s duologue with Miss Grammont. Miss Seyffert’s methods were too discursive and exclamatory. She broke every thread that appeared. The Old George at Salisbury is really old; it shows it, and Miss Seyffert laced the entire evening with her recognition of the fact. “Just look at that old beam!” she would cry suddenly. “To think it was exactly where it is before there was a Cabot in America!”

Miss Grammont let her companion pull the talk about as she chose. After the animation of the afternoon a sort of lazy contentment had taken possession of the younger lady. She sat deep in a basket chair and spoke now and then. Miss Seyffert gave her impressions of France and Italy. She talked of the cabmen of Naples and the beggars of Amalfi.

Apropos of beggars, Miss Grammont from the depths of her chair threw out the statement that Italy was frightfully overpopulated. “In some parts of Italy it is like mites on a cheese. Nobody seems to be living. Everyone is too busy keeping alive.”

“Poor old women carrying loads big enough for mules,” said Miss Seyffert.

“Little children working like slaves,” said Miss Grammont.

“And everybody begging. Even the people at work by the roadside. Who ought to be getting wages – sufficient…”

“Begging – from foreigners – is just a sport in Italy,” said Sir Richmond. “It doesn’t imply want. But I agree that a large part of Italy is frightfully overpopulated. The whole world is. Don’t you think so, Martineau?”

“Well – yes – for its present social organization.”

“For any social organization,” said Sir Richmond.

“I’ve no doubt of it,” said Miss Seyffert, and added amazingly: “I’m out for Birth Control all the time.”

A brief but active pause ensued. Dr. Martineau in a state of sudden distress attempted to drink out of a cold and empty coffee cup.

“The world swarms with cramped and undeveloped lives,” said Sir Richmond. “Which amount to nothing. Which do not even represent happiness. And which help to use up the resources, the fuel and surplus energy of the world.”

“I suppose they have a sort of liking for their lives,” Miss Grammont reflected.

“Does that matter? They do nothing to carry life on. They are just vain repetitions – imperfect dreary, blurred repetitions of one common life. All that they feel has been felt, all that they do has been done better before. Because they are crowded and hurried and underfed and undereducated. And as for liking their lives, they need never have had the chance.”

“How many people are there in the world?” she asked abruptly.

“I don’t know. Twelve hundred, fifteen hundred millions perhaps.”

“And in your world?”

“I’d have two hundred and fifty millions, let us say. At most. It would be quite enough for this little planet, for a time, at any rate. Don’t you think so, doctor?”

“I don’t know,” said Dr. Martineau. “Oddly enough, I have never thought about that question before. At least, not from this angle.”

“But could you pick out two hundred and fifty million aristocrats?” began Miss Grammont. “My native instinctive democracy – ”

 

“Need not be outraged,” said Sir Richmond. “Any two hundred and fifty million would do, They’d be able to develop fully, all of them. As things are, only a minority can do that. The rest never get a chance.”

“That’s what I always say,” said Miss Seyffert.

“A New Age,” said Dr. Martineau; “a New World. We may be coming to such a stage, when population, as much as fuel, will be under a world control. If one thing, why not the other? I admit that the movement of thought is away from haphazard towards control – ”

“I’m for control all the time,” Miss Seyffert injected, following up her previous success.

“I admit,” the doctor began his broken sentence again with marked patience, “that the movement of thought is away from haphazard towards control – in things generally. But is the movement of events?”

“The eternal problem of man,” said Sir Richmond. “Can our wills prevail?”

There came a little pause.

Miss Grammont smiled an enquiry at Miss Seyffert. “If YOU are,” said Belinda.

“I wish I could imagine your world,” said Miss Grammont, rising, “of two hundred and fifty millions of fully developed human beings with room to live and breathe in and no need for wars. Will they live in palaces? Will they all be healthy?.. Machines will wait on them. No! I can’t imagine it. Perhaps I shall dream of it. My dreaming self may be cleverer.”

She held out her hand to Sir Richmond. Just for a moment they stood hand in hand, appreciatively…

“Well!” said Dr. Martineau, as the door closed behind the two Americans, “This is a curious encounter.”

“That young woman has brains,” said Sir Richmond, standing before the fireplace. There was no doubt whatever which young woman he meant. But Dr. Martineau grunted.

“I don’t like the American type,” the doctor pronounced judicially.

“I do,” Sir Richmond countered.

The doctor thought for a moment or so. “You are committed to the project of visiting Avebury?” he said.

“They ought to see Avebury,” said Sir Richmond.

“H’m,” said the doctor, ostentatiously amused by his thoughts and staring at the fire. “Birth Control! I NEVER did.”

Sir Richmond smiled down on the top of the doctor’s head and said nothing.

“I think,” said the doctor and paused. “I shall leave this Avebury expedition to you.”

“We can be back in the early afternoon,” said Sir Richmond. “To give them a chance of seeing the cathedral. The chapter house here is not one to miss…”

“And then I suppose we shall go on?

“As you please,” said Sir Richmond insincerely.

“I must confess that four people make the car at any rate seem tremendously overpopulated. And to tell the truth, I do not find this encounter so amusing as you seem to do… I shall not be sorry when we have waved good-bye to those young ladies, and resume our interrupted conversation.”

Sir Richmond considered something mulish in the doctor’s averted face.

“I find Miss Grammont an extremely interesting – and stimulating human being.

“Evidently.”

The doctor sighed, stood up and found himself delivering one of the sentences he had engendered during his solitary meditations in his room before dinner. He surprised himself by the plainness of his speech. “Let me be frank,” he said, regarding Sir Richmond squarely. “Considering the general situation of things and your position, I do not care very greatly for the part of an accessory to what may easily develop, as you know very well, into a very serious flirtation. An absurd, mischievous, irrelevant flirtation. You may not like the word. You may pretend it is a conversation, an ordinary intellectual conversation. That is not the word. Simply that is not the word. You people eye one another… Flirtation. I give the affair its proper name. That is all. Merely that. When I think – But we will not discuss it now… Good night… Forgive me if I put before you, rather bluntly, my particular point of view.”

Sir Richmond found himself alone. With his eyebrows raised.

Section 6

After twenty-four eventful hours our two students of human motives found themselves together again by the fireplace in the Old George smoking-room. They had resumed their overnight conversation, in a state of considerable tension.

“If you find the accommodation of the car insufficient,” said Sir Richmond in a tone of extreme reasonableness, and I admit it is, we can easily hire a larger car in a place like this.

I would not care if you hired an omnibus, said Dr. Martineau. “I am not coming on if these young women are.”

“But if you consider it scandalous – and really, Martineau, really! as one man to another, it does seem to me to be a bit pernickety of you, a broad and original thinker as you are – ”

“Thought is one matter. Rash, inconsiderate action quite another. And above all, if I spend another day in or near the company of Miss Belinda Seyffert I shall – I shall be extremely rude to her.”

“But,” said Sir Richmond and bit his lower lip and considered.

“We might drop Belinda,” he suggested turning to his friend and speaking in low, confidential tones. “She is quite a manageable person. Quite. She could – for example – be left behind with the luggage and sent on by train. I do not know if you realize how the land lies in that quarter. It needs only a word to Miss Grammont.”

There was no immediate reply. For a moment he had a wild hope that his companion would agree, and then he perceived that the doctor’s silence meant only the preparation of an ultimatum.

“I object to Miss Grammont and that side of the thing, more than I do to Miss Seyffert.”

Sir Richmond said nothing.

“It may help you to see this affair from a slightly different angle if I tell you that twice today Miss Seyffert has asked me if you were a married man.”

“And of course you told her I was.”

“On the second occasion.”

Sir Richmond smiled again.

“Frankly,” said the doctor, “this adventure is altogether uncongenial to me. It is the sort of thing that has never happened in my life. This highway coupling – ”

“Don’t you think,” said Sir Richmond, “that you are attaching rather too much – what shall I say – romantic? – flirtatious? – meaning to this affair? I don’t mind that after my rather lavish confessions you should consider me a rather oversexed person, but isn’t your attitude rather unfair, – unjust, indeed, and almost insulting, to this Miss Grammont? After all, she’s a young lady of very good social position indeed. She doesn’t strike you – does she? – as an undignified or helpless human being. Her manners suggest a person of considerable self-control. And knowing less of me than you do, she probably regards me as almost as safe as – a maiden aunt say. I’m twice her age. We are a party of four. There are conventions, there are considerations… Aren’t you really, my dear Martineau, overdoing all this side of this very pleasant little enlargement of our interests.”

“AM I?” said Dr. Martineau and brought a scrutinizing eye to bear on Sir Richmond’s face.

“I want to go on talking to Miss Grammont for a day or so,” Sir Richmond admitted.

“Then I shall prefer to leave your party.”

There were some moments of silence.

“I am really very sorry to find myself in this dilemma,” said Sir Richmond with a note of genuine regret in his voice.

“It is not a dilemma,” said Dr. Martineau, with a corresponding loss of asperity. “I grant you we discover we differ upon a question of taste and convenience. But before I suggested this trip, I had intended to spend a little time with my old friend Sir Kenelm Latter at Bournemouth. Nothing simpler than to go to him now…”

“I shall be sorry all the same.”

“I could have wished,” said the doctor, “that these ladies had happened a little later…”

The matter was settled. Nothing more of a practical nature remained to be said. But neither gentleman wished to break off with a harsh and bare decision.

“When the New Age is here,” said Sir Richmond, “then, surely, a friendship between a man and a woman will not be subjected to the – the inconveniences your present code would set about it? They would travel about together as they chose?”

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