ere. With infinite effort we nerve ourselves for a crisis that never
comes. The most successful career must show a waste of strength that
might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that
of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is
never taken. On a tragedy of that kind our national morality is duly
silent. It assumes that preparation against danger is in itself a good,
and that men, like nations, are the better for staggering through life
fully armed. The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save
by the Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality
would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of
it is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its
essence is romantic beauty. Margaret hoped that for the future she would
be less cautious, not more cautious, than she had been in the past.

CHAPTER XIII

Over two years passed, and the Schlegel household continued to lead its
life of cultured, but not ignoble, ease, still swimming gracefully on
the grey tides of London. Concerts and plays swept past them, money had
been spent and renewed, reputations won and lost, and the city herself,
emblematic of their lives, rose and fell in a continual flux, while her
shallows washed more widely against the hills of Surrey and over the
fields of Hertfordshire. This famous building had arisen, that was
doomed. To-day Whitehall had been transformed; it would be the turn
of Regent Street to-morrow. And month by month the roads smelt more
strongly of petrol, and were more difficult to cross, and human beings
heard each other speak with greater difficulty, breathed less of the
air, and saw less of the sky. Nature withdrew; the leaves were falling
by midsummer; the sun shone through dirt with an admired obscurity.

To speak against London is no longer fashionable. The Earth as an
artistic cult has had its day, and the literature of the near future
will probably ignore the country and seek inspiration from the town. One
can understand the reaction. Of Pan and the elemental forces, the public
has heard a 'little too much--they seem Victorian, while London is
Georgian--and those who care for the earth with sincerity may wait long
ere the pendulum swings back to her again. Certainly London fascinates.
One visualises it as a tract of quivering grey, intelligent without
purpose, and excitable without love; as a spirit that has al