s extremely cut up, and holding
the child tightly by the hand wept bitterly at the side of the grave.
Miss Anthony, at the cost of a whole week of sneers and abuse from the
poet, saw it all with her own eyes. De Barral clung to the child like a
drowning man. He managed, though, to catch the half-past five fast
train, travelling to town alone in a reserved compartment, with all the
blinds down . . . "

"Leaving the child?" I said interrogatively.

"Yes. Leaving . . . He shirked the problem. He was born that way. He
had no idea what to do with her or for that matter with anything or
anybody including himself. He bolted back to his suite of rooms in the
hotel. He was the most helpless . . . She might have been left in the
Priory to the end of time had not the high-toned governess threatened to
send in her resignation. She didn't care for the child a bit, and the
lonely, gloomy Priory had got on her nerves. She wasn't going to put up
with such a life and, having just come out of some ducal family, she
bullied de Barral in a very lofty fashion. To pacify her he took a
splendidly furnished house in the most expensive part of Brighton for
them, and now and then ran down for a week-end, with a trunk full of
exquisite sweets and with his hat full of money. The governess spent it
for him in extra ducal style. She was nearly forty and harboured a
secret taste for patronizing young men of sorts--of a certain sort. But
of that Mrs. Fyne of course had no personal knowledge then; she told me
however that even in the Priory days she had suspected her of being an
artificial, heartless, vulgar-minded woman with the lowest possible
ideals. But de Barral did not know it. He literally did not know
anything . . . "

"But tell me, Marlow," I interrupted, "how do you account for this
opinion? He must have been a personality in a sense--in some one sense
surely. You don't work the greatest material havoc of a decade at least,
in a commercial community, without having something in you."

Marlow shook his head.

"He was a mere sign, a portent. There was nothing in him. Just about
that time the word Thrift was to the fore. You know the power of words.
We pass through periods dominated by this or that word--it may be
development, or it may be competition, or education, or purity or
efficiency or even sanctity. It is the word of the time. Well just then
it was the word Thrift which was out in the streets walking arm in arm