jection to the form of entertainment with
which he provided the public, it was difficult to see why she kicked
against moving pictures. I should have thought that the performances at
Westminster were considerably more vulgar, certainly far less original
and striking, than the things shown on the cinematograph.

Gorman and I dined at Scott's, chiefly on lobsters, at seven o'clock, an
uncomfortably early hour. We had a twenty-five-mile drive before us to
reach the farm, somewhere in the depths of Hertfordshire, where Tim was
making his experiments. The drive was a very pleasant one. The first
part of it lay along one of the great artery roads which lead from the
centre of London to the North. The evening was fine and warm without
being stuffy, one of those evenings which are the peculiar glory of the
early English summer. It seemed to me that many thousands of people were
passing along that road towards the country. Parties of laughing boys
and girls pedalled northwards on bicycles, swerving in and out through
the traffic. Stout, middle-aged men, with fat, middle-aged women beside
them, drove sturdy ponies, or lean, high-stepping horses, in curious
old-fashioned gigs. Motor cyclists, young men with outstretched chins
and set faces, sped by us, outstripping our car. Others we passed,
riders who had side cars attached to their cycles, young men these, too,
but soberer, weighted with responsibility. They had their wives in the
side cars, wives who looked little more than girls, though many of them
held babies in their arms, and one now and then had a well-grown child
wrapped in rugs at her feet.

"Life!" said Gorman, waving his cigar comprehensively towards the moving
crowds. "Wonderful thing life! Keeps going on. Don't know why it should,
but it does. Nothing seems to make any difference to it."

"Not even your politics," I said. "Curious thing, isn't it, how little
all that fuss of yours matters? It doesn't make any difference which
of your parties is in power. All this goes on just the same. That young
fellow--there, the one who didn't quite break his neck at the lamp
post--would go down to his office to-morrow exactly as he always does,
if every member of the House of Commons dies in the night. You see that
girl with the baby--the one on our left--she'd have had that baby just
the same if the Long Parliament were still sitting. None of your laws
could have made her have that baby, or stopped her. You are simply
fussing