an of Lichfield, experimented--and, for all their scientific ardour,
failed--our descendants will experiment and succeed. An impersonal
generation will take the place of Nature's hideous system. In vast state
incubators, rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with
the population it requires. The family system will disappear; society,
sapped at its very base, will have to find new foundations; and Eros,
beautifully and irresponsibly free, will flit like a gay butterfly from
flower to flower through a sunlit world."

"It sounds lovely," said Anne.

"The distant future always does."

Mary's china blue eyes, more serious and more astonished than ever,
were fixed on Mr. Scogan. "Bottles?" she said. "Do you really think so?
Bottles..."

CHAPTER VI.

Mr. Barbecue-Smith arrived in time for tea on Saturday afternoon. He was
a short and corpulent man, with a very large head and no neck. In his
earlier middle age he had been distressed by this absence of neck,
but was comforted by reading in Balzac's "Louis Lambert" that all the
world's great men have been marked by the same peculiarity, and for a
simple and obvious reason: Greatness is nothing more nor less than
the harmonious functioning of the faculties of the head and heart;
the shorter the neck, the more closely these two organs approach one
another; argal...It was convincing.

Mr. Barbecue-Smith belonged to the old school of journalists. He sported
a leonine head with a greyish-black mane of oddly unappetising hair
brushed back from a broad but low forehead. And somehow he always seemed
slightly, ever so slightly, soiled. In younger days he had gaily called
himself a Bohemian. He did so no longer. He was a teacher now, a kind
of prophet. Some of his books of comfort and spiritual teaching were in
their hundred and twentieth thousand.

Priscilla received him with every mark of esteem. He had never been to
Crome before; she showed him round the house. Mr. Barbecue-Smith was
full of admiration.

"So quaint, so old-world," he kept repeating. He had a rich, rather
unctuous voice.

Priscilla praised his latest book. "Splendid, I thought it was," she
said in her large, jolly way.

"I'm happy to think you found it a comfort," said Mr. Barbecue-Smith.

"Oh, tremendously! And the bit about the Lotus Pool--I thought that so
beautiful."

"I knew you would like that. It came to me, you know, from without." He
waved his hand to indicate the astral world