heard a shout, "Am I an acroterium?" He looked up and saw a naked
child poised on the summit of Cadover. "Yes," he replied; "but they are
unfashionable. Go in," and the vision had remained with him as something
peculiarly gracious. He felt that nonsense and beauty have close
connections,--closer connections than Art will allow,--and that both
would remain when his own heaviness and his own ugliness had perished.
Mrs. Failing found in his remains a sentence that puzzled her. "I see
the respectable mansion. I see the smug fortress of culture. The doors
are shut. The windows are shut. But on the roof the children go dancing
for ever."

Stephen was a child no longer. He never stood on the pediment now,
except for a bet. He never, or scarcely ever, poured water down the
chimneys. When he caught the cat, he seldom dropped her into the
housekeeper's bedroom. But still, when the weather was fair, he liked to
come up after bathing, and get dry in the sun. Today he brought with him
a towel, a pipe of tobacco, and Rickie's story. He must get it done some
time, and he was tired of the six-penny reprints. The sloping gable
was warm, and he lay back on it with closed eyes, gasping for pleasure.
Starlings criticized him, snots fell on his clean body, and over him a
little cloud was tinged with the colours of evening. "Good! good!" he
whispered. "Good, oh good!" and opened the manuscript reluctantly.

What a production! Who was this girl? Where did she go to? Why so much
talk about trees? "I take it he wrote it when feeling bad," he murmured,
and let it fall into the gutter. It fell face downwards, and on the back
he saw a neat little resume in Miss Pembroke's handwriting, intended for
such as him. "Allegory. Man = modern civilization (in bad sense). Girl =
getting into touch with Nature."

In touch with Nature! The girl was a tree! He lit his pipe and gazed at
the radiant earth. The foreground was hidden, but there was the village
with its elms, and the Roman Road, and Cadbury Rings. There, too, were
those woods, and little beech copses, crowning a waste of down. Not to
mention the air, or the sun, or water. Good, oh good!

In touch with Nature! What cant would the books think of next? His eyes
closed. He was sleepy. Good, oh good! Sighing into his pipe, he fell
asleep.

XIII

Glad as Agnes was when her lover returned for lunch, she was at the
same time rather dismayed: she knew that Mrs. Failing would not like her
plans a