and behave like a gentleman. But no, you must needs stick to
Bernard, though you never get any thanks for it! You're an
unpractical dreamer."

"I don't know what on earth you're talking about."

"And you're all in it together, damn you!" Lawrence broke out
with an angry laugh. "It's all equally picturesque--feudal's
the word! I never knew anything like it in my life and I
wouldn't have believed it could continue to exist. What do you
do with gipsies? evict 'em, I suppose." He flung a second
question at Val which made the son of a vicarage knit his brows.

"As a matter of fact there's a house in Brook Lane about which
Bendish and I are a good deal exercised in our minds at the
present moment . . . and the percentage of children born too soon
after marriage is disastrous. You're all out, Hyde. Nothing
could be more commonplace than Chilmark, believe me: life is like
this all over rural England, and it's only from a distance that
one takes it for Arcadia."

"Folly," said Lawrence. "Good God, why should you exercise your
simple minds over the house in Brook Lane? Ah! because the men
who go to it are your own men, and the parsonage and the Castle
are answerable for their souls." Val, irritated, suggested that
if Hyde's forebears had lived in Chilmark since the time when
every freeman had to swear fealty, laying his hands between the
knees of his lord, Hyde might have shared this feeling. "But
they didn't," said Lawrence, drily. "My grandfather was a
pawnbroker in the New Cut."

"Then perhaps you're hardly in a position to judge."

"Judge? I don't judge, my good fellow--I'm lost in admiration!
In an age of materialism it's refreshing to come across these
simple, homespun virtues. I didn't know there was a man left in
England that would exist, for choice, on three hundred a year.
Are you always content with your rustic ideals, Val? Haven't you
any ambition?"

"I?" said Val.

"'Carry me out of the fight,'" quoted Lawrence under his breath.
"I swear I forgot."

Silence fell again, the silence on Lawrence's part of continual
conflict and adjustment, and on Val's mainly of irritation.
Lawrence talked too much and too loosely, and was over-given to
damning what he disliked--a trick that went with his rings and
his diamond monogram. Val was not interested in a townsman's
amateur satire; in so far as Lawrence was not satirical, he had
probably drunk one glass more of Bernard's' champagne than was
good