ety carrying stinking fish."

"I suppose it would," said March, with a smile.

"Rather odd to enter a drawing-room carrying a large luminous cod,"
continued the stranger, in his listless way. "How quaint it would
be if one could carry it about like a lantern, or have little sprats
for candles. Some of the seabeasts would really be very pretty like
lampshades; the blue sea-snail that glitters all over like
starlight; and some of the red starfish really shine like red stars.
But, naturally, I'm not looking for them here."

March thought of asking him what he was looking for; but, feeling
unequal to a technical discussion at least as deep as the deep-sea
fishes, he returned to more ordinary topics.

"Delightful sort of hole this is," he said. "This little dell and
river here. It's like those places Stevenson talks about, where
something ought to happen."

"I know," answered the other. "I think it's because the place
itself, so to speak, seems to happen and not merely to exist.
Perhaps that's what old Picasso and some of the Cubists are trying
to express by angles and jagged lines. Look at that wall like low
cliffs that juts forward just at right angles to the slope of turf
sweeping up to it. That's like a silent collision. It's like a
breaker and the back-wash of a wave."

March looked at the low-browed crag overhanging the green slope and
nodded. He was interested in a man who turned so easily from the
technicalities of science to those of art; and asked him if he
admired the new angular artists.

"As I feel it, the Cubists are not Cubist enough," replied the
stranger. "I mean they're not thick enough. By making things
mathematical they make them thin. Take the living lines out of that
landscape, simplify it to a right angle, and you flatten it out to a
mere diagram on paper. Diagrams have their own beauty; but it is of
just the other sort. They stand for the unalterable things; the
calm, eternal, mathematical sort of truths; what somebody calls the
'white radiance of'--"

He stopped, and before the next word came something had happened
almost too quickly and completely to be realized. From behind the
overhanging rock came a noise and rush like that of a railway train;
and a great motor car appeared. It topped the crest of cliff, black
against the sun, like a battle-chariot rushing to destruction in
some wild epic. March automatically put out his hand in one futile
gesture, as if to catch a falling tea-cup in