o art,
would bring tears into his eyes. He had all the virtues which came easy
to him, and, leaving Annette out of question for the moment, he was
without vices. He had rubbed against the world long enough to have
grown polished. Nobody questioned his origin or upbringing. His talk was
brilliant, if it bore no searching analysis, and he had his circle of
listeners wherever he went. He was a born raconteur, and had proved
himself in that particular, and his increasing acquaintance with
the stage and the professors of its trifling art helped him in this
direction.

Fortescue's house was his one haunt apart from the clubs, the one
civilized and civilizing home he knew with intimacy, and one night there
over a cigarette and a whisky-and-soda he turned his jejune philosophy
of life upon his host.

'I confess,' he said, 'that I have no great opinion of the marriage
tie. Let there be a loyal association between man and woman, let each
recognise the responsibilities which belong to it, and where's the fear
of any priestly ban or the need of any priestly blessing?'

'My dear Armstrong,' said Fortescue, who was very much his senior, and
a man of a rather starched propriety by nature, 'I would beg you, if you
permit me, to avoid that theme. The marriage tie to me means a full half
of the whole sanctity of life. To my mind, the man who derides it is, so
far as his derision carries him, an ass.'

'Oh,' cried Paul, laughing, 'I like a straight hitter.'

Fortescue shifted the theme with some adroitness, but the talk grew
stiff and formal. The younger man felt the disapproval of the elder, and
was ill at ease under it. He rather shied at the house from that
time forward, and, since an awkwardness of that kind grows easily and
rapidly, his visits dwindled into rarity, until they ceased by automatic
process.

It was years before he found a home again.

'Along with many noble and admirable qualities the English people have
one defect, which is recognised in the satires of every neighbouring
nation, but is never acknowledged by themselves.' Thus Paul Armstrong
at his tent door, with the voice of the torrent to emphasize the waste
silence of his dwelling-place, and the fog to clear his mental vision by
shutting out from his perception all extraneous things; not thinking in
these words, or thinking in words at all, but dunking thus: 'Propriety
is a British legend and a British lie.'

He was back in the old chambers, which were in o