r. As people are judged, she
was entirely nice, entirely worthy, entirely estimable. And with that,
for it does not enter into such estimates, she had neither feelings of
the mind nor of the heart but only of the senses. All that her senses
set before her she either overvalued or undervalued: she was the
complete and perfect snob in the most refined and purest meaning of the
word.

She was much liked, and she liked many.

CHAPTER V

I

The Penny Green Garden House Development Scheme was begun in 1910. In
1908, the year of the measles and the separated bedrooms, no shadow of
it had yet been thrown. It never occurred to any one that a railway
would one day link Penny Green with Tidborough and all the rest of the
surrounding world, or that a railway to Tidborough was desirable. Sabre
bicycled in daily to Fortune, East and Sabre's, and the daily ride to
and fro had become a curious pleasure to him.

There had once occurred to him as he rode, and thereafter had persisted
and accumulated, the feeling that, on the daily, solitary passage
between Tidborough and Penny Green, he was mysteriously detached from,
mysteriously suspended between, the two centres that were his two
worlds,--his business world and his home world.

With its daily recurrence the thought developed: it enlarged to the
whimsical notion that here, on his bicycle on the road, he was magically
escaped out of his two worlds, not belonging to or responsible to either
of his two worlds, which amounted to delicious detachment from all the
universe. A mysteriously aloof, free, irresponsible attitude of mind was
thus obtained: it was a condition in which--as one looking down from a
high tower on scurrying, antlike human beings--their oddness, their
futility, the apparent aimlessness of their excited scurrying became
apparent; hence frequent thought, on these rides, on the rather odd
thing that life was.

He was not in the least aware that so simple, so practical and so
obviously essential a thing as his daily ride--as simple, practical and
obviously essential as getting out of bed in the morning and returning
to bed at night--was moulding a mind always prone to develop meditative
grooves. But it did develop his mind in the extraordinary way in which
minds are moulded by the most simple habits. In this mere matter of
conveyance a philosopher might trace back a singularly brutal and
callous murder to the moulding into callous and brutal regard of other
p