as shaking hands, heartily, with a big, sodden fellow, in
shabby clothes, his virile face marred by excesses; the frail little
woman with him looked up at him with a world of anxious love in her
eyes; and then Mrs. Thorpe led her away, talking cheerily.

All the way home John discoursed on Art. Phyllis drank it in. She
thought him a wonderful being.

"The trouble with these literary chaps is that they revolve in a
circle," he declared, posing securely on his new pedestal. "They have
their writing rooms, all strewn with carefully disarranged
paraphernalia; and they have their clubs, where they meet only each
other and praise each other's work, and damn the work of the absent
ones: and they go prowling about looking for a bohemia that never
existed, and can never exist for them; for bohemia is simply youth and
poverty and high aspirations, combined, and can't be found by search. If
these literary chaps are exceptionally fortunate, they are invited to
great houses, where they dine with stupid, overfed people who pretend
they have read their books, though they haven't, unless they are unfit
to read. And so they go on wearily turning that treadmill--and wonder
why their work has lost freshness, and convince themselves it has gained
style. I am not a literary chap, and I don't wish to be one. I am a
poet. Poetry is my profession. And the only way I can succeed in it, the
only way it is worth succeeding in, is to relate it to life, real life,
the big, elemental struggle for existence that is going on, here in
London, and everywhere; to wed Art to Reality, lest the jade saunter the
streets, a light o' love, seeking to sell her soul."

As they walked past the bookshop, and through the little square, John
said:--

"I should like to live in London eight months of the year, and give most
of my time to Saint Ruth's. And the rest of the year I should like to
live in a village, like Rosemary, Sussex, where I lived as a boy; on the
outskirts of a little village, near the green country; and do my writing
there, under the blue sky--with God looking over my shoulder, to see the
work well done."

XI

There was a motor-car in front of the house; its blinding lights
illuminated the windows at the other end of the square.

Mrs. Farquharson met them at the door.

"He's upstairs in your room. Sir Peter Oglebay--your uncle," she said,
in an excited whisper. "Three times he has called this day; once at
eleven, once at two; and n