t no fire in all his soul and body," complained Dermot Hope.
"He's a symbol of prosperous content--of all we're fighting. It's people
like him who are the real obstructionists; the people who don't see, not
because they're blind, but because they're too pleased with their own
conditions to look beyond them. It's people like him who are pouring
water on the fires as they are lit, because fires are such bad form,
and might burn up their precious chattels if allowed to get out of hand.
Take life placidly; don't get excited, it's so vulgar; that's their
religion. They've neither enthusiasm nor imagination in them. And so ..."

And so forth, just as it came out in "Progress" once a month. Peter
didn't read "Progress," because he wasn't interested in the future, being
essentially a child of to-day. Besides, he too hated conflagrations,
thinking the precious chattels they would burn up much too precious for
that. Peter was no lover either of destruction or construction; perhaps
he too was an obstructionist; though not without imagination. His uncle
knew he had a regrettable tendency to put things in the foreground and
keep ideas very much in the background, and called him therefore a
phenomenalist. Lucy shared this tendency, being a good deal of an artist
and nothing at all of a philosopher.

CHAPTER IV

THE COMPLETE SHOPPER

Six months later Peter called at the Hopes' to say good-bye before he
went to Italy. He found Lucy in, and Urquhart was there too, talking
to her in a room full of leaping fire-shadows. Peter sat down on the
coal-scuttle (it was one of those coal-scuttles you can sit on
comfortably) and said, "Leslie's taking me to Italy on Sunday. Isn't
it nice for me. I wish he was taking you too."

Lucy, clasping small hands, said, "Oh, Peter, I wish he was!"

Urquhart, looking at her said, "Do you want to go?" and she nodded, with
her mouth tight shut as if to keep back floods of eloquence on that
subject. "So do I," said Urquhart, and added, in his casual way, "Will
you and your father come with me?"

"You paying?" said Lucy, in her frank, unabashed way like a child's; and
he smiled down at her.

"Yes. Me paying."

"'Twould be nice," she breathed, her grey eyes wide with wistful
pleasure. "I would love it. But--but father wouldn't, you know. He
wouldn't want to go, and if he did he'd want to pay for it himself,
and do it his own way, and travel third-class and be dreadfully
uncomfortable. Wouldn't