ty of things, but their net effect was incoherence. He had
not been merely passive, but his efforts to break away into creative
realities had added to rather than diminished his accumulating sense of
futility.

The natural development of his position under the influence of Lady
Marayne had enormously enlarged the circle of his acquaintances. He had
taken part in all sorts of social occasions, and sat and listened to
a representative selection of political and literary and social
personages, he had been several times to the opera and to a great number
and variety of plays, he had been attentively inconspicuous in several
really good week-end parties. He had spent a golden October in North
Italy with his mother, and escaped from the glowing lassitude of
Venice for some days of climbing in the Eastern Alps. In January, in an
outbreak of enquiry, he had gone with Lionel Maxim to St. Petersburg and
had eaten zakuska, brightened his eyes with vodka, talked with a number
of charming people of the war that was then imminent, listened to
gipsy singers until dawn, careered in sledges about the most silent
and stately of capitals, and returned with Lionel, discoursing upon
autocracy and assassination, Japan, the Russian destiny, and the
government of Peter the Great. That excursion was the most after his
heart of all the dispersed employments of his first year. Through the
rest of the winter he kept himself very fit, and still further qualified
that nervous dislike for the horse that he had acquired from Prothero by
hunting once a week in Essex. He was incurably a bad horseman; he rode
without sympathy, he was unready and convulsive at hedges and ditches,
and he judged distances badly. His white face and rigid seat and a
certain joylessness of bearing in the saddle earned him the singular
nickname, which never reached his ears, of the "Galvanized Corpse."
He got through, however, at the cost of four quite trifling spills
and without damaging either of the horses he rode. And his physical
self-respect increased.

On his writing-desk appeared a few sheets of manuscript that increased
only very slowly. He was trying to express his Cambridge view of
aristocracy in terms of Finacue Street, West.

The artistic and intellectual movements of London had made their
various demands upon his time and energies. Art came to him with a
noble assumption of his interest and an intention that presently became
unpleasantly obvious to sell him pic