I

IN the great glass house adjoining the hall at Ravensham House, Lady Casterley stood in front of some Japanese lilies. She was a slender, short old woman, with an ivory-colored face, a thin nose, and keen eyes half-veiled by delicate wrinkled lids. Very still, in her gray dress, and with gray hair, she gave the impression of a little figure carved out of fine, worn steel. Her firm, spidery, small hand held a letter written in a free and somewhat sprawling style:

MONKLAND COURT, DEVON
June 9th.

MY DEAR MOTHER,

Valleys is motoring up to-morrow. He'll look in on you on the way if he can. This new war scare has taken him to Town. I shan't be at Valleys House myself till Milton's election is over. The fact is, I dare n't leave him down here alone. He sees his 'Anonyma' every day. A Mr. Courtier, who wrote that book against war, though they say he's been a soldier of fortune, is staying at the inn. He knows her, too-one can only hope, for Milton's sake, too well:-an attractive person, with red moustaches, rather nice and mad. He's working for the Radical. VOL. 106- NO. 4

I'm sure Valleys and I feel years younger than either Milton or Agatha, though we did produce them. One does n't feel it with Bertie or Babs, luckily. The war scare is having an excellent effect on Milton's candidature. Claud Harbinger is with us, too, working for Milton; but, as a matter of fact, I think he's after Babs. It's rather melancholy, -Babs is only twenty, still, what can one expect, with her looks; and Claud is rather a fine specimen. They talk of him a lot now, as the most promising of the young Tories.

Lady Casterley again lowered the letter, and stood listening. A prolonged, muffled sound as of distant cheering and groans had penetrated the great conservatory, vibrating among the pale petals of the lily flowers, and setting free their scent in short waves of perfume. She passed into the hall; there stood an old man with sallow face and long white whiskers.

'What was that noise, Clifton?' 'A posse of Socialists, my lady, on their way to Putney to hold a demonstration; the people are hooting them. They've got blocked just outside the gates.'

'Are they making speeches?'

"They are talking some kind of rant, my lady.'

'I'll go and hear them. Give me my black stick.'

Above the velvet-dark, flat-boughed cedar-trees, which rose like black pagodas on either side of the drive, the sky hung lowering in one great purple cloud, endowed with sinister life by a single white beam striking up into it from the horizon. Beneath this canopy of cloud a small phalanx of dusty, disheveled-looking men and women was drawn up in the road, guarding, and encouraging with cheers, a tall, blackcoated orator. Before and behind this phalanx, a mob of men and boys kept up an accompaniment of groans and jeering.

Lady Casterley and her 'majordomo' stood six paces from the scrolled iron gates, and watched. The slight steel-colored figure with steel-colored hair was more arresting in its immobility than all the vociferations and gestures of the mob. Her eyes alone moved under their half-drooped lids; her right hand clutched tightly the handle of her stick. The speaker's voice rose in shrill protest against the exploitation of 'the people'; it sank in ironical comment on Christianity; it

demanded passionately to be free from the continuous burden of this militarist taxation; it threatened that the people would take things into their own hands.

Lady Casterley turned her head. 'He is talking nonsense, Clifton. It is going to rain. I shall go in.'

In the white stone porch she paused. The purple cloud had broken; a blind fury of rain was deluging the fast-scattering crowd. A faint smile came on Lady Casterley's lips.

'It will do them good to have their ardor damped a little. You will get wet, Clifton - hurry! I expect Lord Valleys to dinner. Have a room got ready. He's motoring from Monkland.'

II

Ravensham House, on the borders of Richmond Park, had served as suburban seat to the Casterley family since the time when it became usual to have a country residence within easy driving distance of Westminster. In one of its bedrooms the Earl of Valleys was dressing for dinner. His firm, tanned, good-natured face, with grizzled fair moustache, was well-shaped, and lighted by a pair of steady, levelglancing gray eyes. He was brushing his wet hair vigorously with silverbacked brushes. Blue silk braces, delineating his comely chest, supported the coverings of two legs which 'stood over' a very little at the knee, as if while accustomed to do his own riding, he was used to have his standing done for him. He tied his tie without looking at the glass. He seemed to be thinking of anything but dressing. Then suddenly, as though remembering what he was doing, he looked round the room; catching sight of his coat, he put it on, and went downstairs.

In an enormously high, white-paneled room, with very little furniture,

he found Lady Casterley awaiting him. Greeting his mother-in-law respectfully, he said,

'Motored up in seven hours, ma'am, - not bad going."

'I am glad you came. When is Milton's election?'

'On the twenty-ninth.'

'Pity! He should be away from Monkland, with that - anonymous woman living there.'

Lord Valleys murmured, -
'Oh! you've heard of her?'

A slight frown contracted his brows above the straight glance of a man who drives a team of horses, and knows exactly what he has to look out for in the road.

Lady Casterley said sharply, -
'You're too easy-going, Geoffrey.'
Lord Valleys smiled.

"These war scares,' he said, 'are getting a bore. Can't quite make out what the feeling of the country is about them.'

Lady Casterley rose.

'It has none. When war comes, the feeling will be all right. It always is. Give me your arm. Are you hungry?' When Lord Valleys spoke of war, he spoke as one who, since he arrived at years of discretion, had lived within the circle of those who direct the destinies of states. It was for him, as for the lilies in the great glass house, impossible to see with the eyes, or feel with the feelings, of a flower of the garden outside. Soaked in the best prejudices and manners of his class, he lived a life no more shut off from the general life than was to be expected. Indeed, in some sort, as a man of facts and common sense, he was in touch with the opinion of the average man. A good and liberal landlord, well-disposed toward the arts until those arts revealed that which he had not before perceived; neither narrow nor puritanical, so long as the shell of 'good form'

was preserved intact; never ridiculously in earnest; efficient, but not strenuous, or desirous of pushing ideas to logical conclusions; endowed with light hands, steady eyes, and no nerves to speak of he had been born in the saddle of the state with the trick, transmitted through very many generations, of sticking there. As a husband, easy-going; as a father, indulgent; as a politician, careful and straightforward; as a man, moderately sensuous, addicted to pleasure, to work, to fresh air; and endowed with those excellent manners that have no mannerisms. He was the typical workaday aristocrat, embodying the real strength of his order, since he possessed none of the spiritual implacability which distinguishes the 'aristocrat pure,' that rare flower found in every rank of life. He admired, and was fond of, his wife, and had never regretted his marriage. He had never regretted anything, unless it were that he had not yet won the Derby, or quite succeeded in perfecting a variation of the pointer dog, whose body, all but its eyebrows, should be permanently white. His mother-inlaw he respected, as one might respect a principle.

There was indeed in the personality of that little old lady the tremendous force of accumulated decision - the inherited assurance of one whose prestige had never been questioned; who from long immunity, and a certain clear-cut practicality bred by the habit of command, had indeed lost the power of perceiving that her prestige ever could be questioned. Her knowledge of her own mind was no ordinary piece of learning, had not, in fact, been learned at all, but sprang full-forged from an active, dominating temperament. Fortified by the habit, common to her class, of knowing thoroughly the more patent side of public affairs; armored by the tradition of a culture

demanded by leadership; inspired by ideas, but always the same ideas; owning no master, but in servitude to her own habit of leading, she had a mind formidable as the two-edged swords wielded by her ancestors, the FitzHarolds, at Agincourt or Poitiers — a mind which had ever instinctively rejected that inner knowledge of herself or of the selves of others, produced by habits of introspection, contemplation, and understanding, so deleterious to authority. If Lord Valleys was the body of the aristocratic machine, Lady Casterley was the steel spring inside it. All her life studiously unaffected and simple in attire; of plain and frugal habit; an early riser; working at something or other from morning till night, and as little worn out at seventy-eight as most women at fifty, she had only one weak spot, and that was her strength, - blindness as to the nature and size of her place in the scheme of things. She was a type, a force. 'What will you drink, my lord?' 'Whiskey and soda, Clifton.' 'Very good, my lord.'

There was about the room where they were dining unlike the rooms of the newly-rich, or of artistic people - nothing to describe. It was like the daisy in the old song, 'smell-less, and most quaint'; or like the head of an old and well-bred dog who lies on a mat with his eyes moving quietly from side to side to follow the flight of swallows across a lawn. That room rested. Its day was done. It was there for all time, high, unornate; having nothing to strive for. In the very centre of its stillness, five lilies stood in an old silver chalice; and a portrait of the late Lord Casterley hung on one gray-white wall. Lady Casterley spoke.

'I hope Milton is taking his own line.' "That's the trouble. He suffers from swollen principles-only wish he could keep 'em out of his speeches.'

'Let him be; and get him away from that woman as soon as his election's over. How long has she been there?' 'About a year, I think.'

'And you don't know anything about her?'

Lord Valleys raised his shoulders.

'Ah!' said Lady Casterley, 'exactly! You're letting the thing drift. I shall go down myself. I suppose Gertrude can have me. What has that man Courtier to do with this woman?'

Lord Valleys smiled. In this smile was the whole of his polite and easygoing philosophy. 'I am no meddler, no uncharitable bourgeois,' it seemed to say.

At sight of that smile Lady Casterley tightened her lips. 'He is a firebrand,' she said. 'I read that book of his against war - most inflammatory. Have you seen it?'

Lord Valleys shook his head.

'Aimed at Grant - and Rosenstern, chiefly. I have just seen one of the results, outside my own gates. A mob of anti-war agitators.'

Lord Valleys yawned.

'Really? I'd no idea Courtier had any influence. Motoring's made me very sleepy.'

'Courtier is a dangerous man. Most idealists are negligible; but he's a man of action as well, half-mad, of course; - his book was quite clever.'

'I wish to goodness we could see the last of these scares, they only make both countries look foolish,' muttered Lord Valleys.

Lady Casterley raised her glass, full of a blood-red wine. "The war would save us,' she said.

'War is no joke.'

'It would be the beginning of a better state of things.'

"You think so?'

'We should get the lead again as a nation, and socialism would be put back fifty years.'

Lord Valleys made three little heaps of salt, and paused to count them; the slight lifting of his eyebrows and shoulders betrayed as much uneasiness as he ever suffered to escape him.

'I hope to God,' he thought, 'nothing 'll come of these scares!'

The car glided on into the long road, swarming with traffic, toward the fashionable heart of London.. Outside sta

'I notice that you are never certain of anything till it has happened, Geoffrey.'

Lord Valleys smiled. 'What is it, Clifton?'

'Your chauffeur would like to know, my lord, what time you will have the car.'

'Directly after dinner.'

Twenty minutes later, he was turning through the scrolled iron gates into the road for London. It was falling dark; and in the tremulous sky clouds were piled up, and drifted here and there with a sort of endless lack of purpose. No direction seemed to have been decreed unto their wings. They had met together in the firmament like a flock of giant magpies crossing and recrossing each others' flight. The smell of rain was in the air. The car raised no dust, but bored swiftly on, searching out the road with its lamps. On Putney Bridge its march was stayed by a string of wagons.

Lord Valleys looked to right and left. The river reflected the thousand lights of buildings piled along her sides, the lamps of the embankments, the lanterns of moored barges. The sinuous pallid body of this great creature, forever gliding down to the sea, roused in his lordship's mind no symbolic image. He had had to do with her years back at the Board of Trade, and knew her for what she was, extremely dirty, and getting abominably thin just where he would have liked her plump. Yet as he leaned back and lighted a cigar, there came to him a queer feeling, as if he were in the presence of a woman he was fond of.

papers were of no reassuring order.
"THE PLOT THICKENS.'
'MORE REVELATIONS.'

'GRAVE SITUATION THREATENED!' And before each poster could be seen a little eddy in the stream of the passers-by, formed by persons glancing at the news, and disengaging themselves, to press on again. Lord Valleys caught himself wondering what they thought of it! What was passing behind those pallid rounds of flesh turned toward the posters?

Did they think at all, these men and women in the street? What was their attitude toward this vaguely-threatened cataclysm? Face after face, stolid and apathetic, expressed no thought, no active desire, certainly no enthusiasm, hardly any dread. Poor devils! The thing was no more within their control than it was within the power of ants to stop the ruination of their antheap by some passing boy. It was quite true what they said that the people had never had much voice in the making of war. And the words of an article in the Radical weekly, which he always forced himself to read, recurred to him. 'Ignorant of the facts, hypnotized by the words "Country" and "Patriotism"; in the grip of mob-instinct and inborn prejudice against the foreigner; helpless by reason of his раtience, stoicism, good faith, and confidence in those above him; helpless by reason of his snobbery, mutual distrust, carelessness for the morrow, and lack of public spirit, in the face of war how impotent and to be pitied is the man in the street!' That paper was always a little hi-falutin'!

-

How would this affect Milton's