rdly. I went on down the village street,
not looking back, surprised at myself, and infinitely perplexed.
It was as if I had discovered something overlooked that disarranged
all my plans, something entirely disconcerting. For the first time
I went back preoccupied and without eagerness to Melmount's work.
I wanted to go on thinking about Nettie; my mind had suddenly become
voluminously productive concerning her and Verrall.

Section 2

The talk we three had together in the dawn of the new time is very
strongly impressed upon my memory. There was something fresh and
simple about it, something young and flushed and exalted. We took
up, we handled with a certain naive timidity, the most difficult
questions the Change had raised for men to solve. I recall we
made little of them. All the old scheme of human life had dissolved
and passed away, the narrow competitiveness, the greed and base
aggression, the jealous aloofness of soul from soul. Where had
it left us? That was what we and a thousand million others
were discussing. . . .

It chances that this last meeting with Nettie is inseparably
associated--I don't know why--with the landlady of the Menton inn.

The Menton inn was one of the rare pleasant corners of the old
order; it was an inn of an unusual prosperity, much frequented by
visitors from Shaphambury, and given to the serving of lunches and
teas. It had a broad mossy bowling-green, and round about it were
creeper-covered arbors amidst beds of snap-dragon, and hollyhock,
and blue delphinium, and many such tall familiar summer flowers.
These stood out against a background of laurels and holly, and
above these again rose the gables of the inn and its signpost--a
white-horsed George slaying the dragon--against copper beeches under
the sky.

While I waited for Nettie and Verrall in this agreeable trysting
place, I talked to the landlady--a broad-shouldered, smiling,
freckled woman--about the morning of the Change. That motherly,
abundant, red-haired figure of health was buoyantly sure that
everything in the world was now to be changed for the better.
That confidence, and something in her voice, made me love her as
I talked to her. "Now we're awake," she said, "all sorts of things
will be put right that hadn't any sense in them. Why? Oh! I'm sure
of it."

Her kind blue eyes met mine in an infinitude of friendliness. Her
lips in her pauses shaped in a pretty faint smile.

Old tradition was strong in us; all