oducts, and their adulteration had reached a most amazing
limit of badness.)

My thought of Beatrice was brief that morning, but I continued during
most of my little excursion to dwell upon my new friends in South
Kensington. I wondered how Constance Grey spent Sunday in London, and
whether the confinement of the town oppressed her after the spacious
freedom of the South African life she had described to me. I remembered
that I had promised to call upon her and her aunt very soon, and
wondered whether that afternoon, after the Demonstration, would be too
soon. I mentally decided that it would, but that I would go all the
same.

And then, suddenly, as the steamer passed under Hammersmith Bridge, a
thought went through me like cold steel:

"She will very soon return to that freer, wider life out there in South
Africa."

How I hated the place. South Africa! I had always associated it with
Imperialism, militarism--"empireism," as I called it in my own mind: the
strange, outside interests, which one regarded as opposing home
interests, social reform, and the like. Though I did not know that any
political party considerations influenced me one atom, I was in reality,
like nearly every one else at that time, mentally the slave and creature
of party feeling, party tradition, party prejudice. But now I had a new
cause for hating those remote uplands of Empire, those outside places.

Sitting under a tree in Kew Gardens, I had leisure in which to browse
over the matter, and, upon reflection, I was astonished that this sudden
thought of mine should have struck so shrewdly, so violently, into my
peace of mind. I tried to neutralize its effect by reminding myself that
I had met Constance Grey only twice; that she was in many ways outside
my purview; that she was the intimate friend of people who had helped to
make history, the special contributor to _The Times_, with her
introductions to ex-Cabinet Ministers in England and her other relations
with great people; that such a woman could never play an intimate part
in my life. Her friendliness could not be the prelude to friendship with
the assistant editor of _The Mass_; it probably meant no more than a
courteous deference to John Crondall's whim, I told myself. But I would
call at the South Kensington flat, certainly; it would be boorish to
refrain, and--there was no denying I should have been mightily
perturbed if any valid reason had appeared against my going to see
Constance