en why did you wire for me if the whole affair was so trivial as you
make out now?"

"I wanted a corrective," Stella explained.

"But how am I a corrective outside the fact that I'm your brother? And,
you know, I don't believe you would consider that relationship had much
to do with my importance one way or the other."

"In fact," said Stella, laughing, "what you're really trying to do is to
work the conversation round to yourself. One reason why you're a
corrective to George is that you're a gentleman."

"There you are!" cried Michael excitedly, and as if with that word she
had released a spring that was holding back all the pent-up conclusions
of some time past, he launched forth upon the display of his latest
excavation of life. "We all half apologize for using the word
'gentleman,' but we can't get on without it. People say it means nothing
nowadays. Although if it ever meant anything, it should mean more
nowadays than it did in the past, since every generation should add
something to its value. I haven't been able to talk this out before,
because you're the only person who knows what I was born and at the same
time is able to understand that for me to think about my circumstances
rather a lot doesn't imply any very morbid self-consciousness. _You're_
all right. You have this astonishing gift which would have guaranteed
you self-expression whatever you had been born. When one sees an artist
up to your level, one doesn't give a damn for his ancestors or his
family or his personal features apart from the security of the art's
consummation. Perhaps I have a vague inclination toward art myself, but
inclinations are no good without something to lean up against at the
end. These people who came to your party that night in Paris are in a
way much happier, or rather much more secure than me. However far they
incline without support, they're most of them inclining away from a
top-heavy suburban life. So if they become failures, they'll always have
the consolation of knowing they had either got to incline outward or be
suffocated."

Michael stopped for a while and stared out through the cottage lattices
at the stretch of common, at the steel-blue chain of ponds and the
narrow portal that led to this secluded forest-world, and away down the
lane to where on either side of the spraying brambles a plantation of
delicate birch-trees was tinted with the diaphanous brown and gold and
pale fawn of their last attiring.

"If I