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 the recipient of compliments and confidences, given glimpses of situations at which formerly he had only hazarded guesses. In short, he found that many of Floss's lost souls were well worth a reasonable amount of attention on the part of a man whose brow had once been so high that his eyes were on the level of clouds while his feet tripped over the dung-heaps. At their worst their schemes were diverting; at their best they threw off spectacular showers of sparks from the flames that consumed them. Moreover their wit, their slang, their acrimony, their jollity added condiments that the life of a minor diplomatist was badly in need of.

"Don't you ever get tired of them, Floss?" he asked, as he was taking leave.

"Oh, now and then I clear 'em all out and take a trip somewheres," said the princess. "But I like rotters—always have."

In the train he pondered Floss's admission. He could understand it, for he had a weakness for rotters himself. Max Bruff and Marthe, Léon and Olga, whose ghost still walked,—each was a rotter after his fashion, and each had occupied a large space in his mind or his heart.

By the end of the summer he had forced his way through the story to a conclusion which annoyed him by being a virtual contradiction of his whole thesis.

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 Only by trial and error, he reflected, can one find out what one truly thinks: you match your characters and situations and theories much as Mme. Choiseul matches bits of velvet and silk, and it's only when you've erected them into a monstrous burlesque that you see what you should have done to make it stylish. Even Goethe, he was thinking, would have spared Werther's life in a revised version.

The story would have to be rewritten, but at least he now had a clue to it.

Mme. Choiseul and her hats and blotches and daily misadventures with the milk had been getting on his nerves. More than once he had contemplated moving into a small flat. One reason I have no friends, the thought one day struck him, is that I have no home. He had run into Mamie Mangum and she had asked him to tea, and it occurred to him that it would be pleasant to have an apartment,—not like Mamie's, heaven forbid!—and to invite people for tea—or whatever, he added guiltily to himself.

Mamie had shown him a notice in an American musical weekly which recounted in phrases almost dithyrambic her triumphs in Naples and Rome. Grover couldn't repress a suspicion that Mamie had paid for the notices with money her father had earned on the sale of sheep and steers, but the fact remained that she was proving her right to exist. She was now working like a Trojan for a debut in Brussels, and being before his eyes a fantastic illustration of the

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 truth he had recently discovered: that talent is largely a matter of knowing how to apply your gift.

He had asked her about Hellgren, and she had shrugged her shoulders.

"I haven't seen him for ages. They say he's turned into a perfect anchorite. Oh, I must show you the picture of my wop lover," and Mamie searched through her photographs for the portrait of the baritone who had sung Athanaël to her Thaïs.

"You do like 'em fat!" was Grover's comment.

She snatched the photograph away from him and told him he had no soul.

"I wish to heck I hadn't," said Grover.

Two babes in the woods of Europe, he reflected, pathetic products of Idaho and Massachusetts craving the fulfillment of a romantic hunger for a nectar and ambrosia that don't exist this side of Olympus, staying, the pangs with pretty poor substitutes—his doxy at Rapallo, Mamie's greasy monk. And even at that, Mamie was probably maligning the man.

He had been nearly a year in his position, as he realized one morning when he came into the office to find a fire lighted in the grate, the first inescapable proof of autumn. Though he had been entrusted with more interesting responsibilities, there was still a good deal of proof-reading to be done and he was settling

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 down to the morning's galleys when the portier summoned him to the telephone, a most unusual occurrence.

If he had been given a hundred guesses he wouldn't have hit on the voice which awaited him at the other end of the line. It was Mr. Marple. Would Grover dine with him that evening?

A characteristically American procedure—short, and cordial enough, but so —out of the blue, into the blue, for Mr. Marple offered no explanation of his presence alone in the city, and as Grover recalled it, he loved his home and hated to travel.

When he found him at the hotel, Grover was shocked to see him so aged. The two year interval had seemed to effect the ravages of a decade. Mr. Marple was leaving the next day for Germany, where he was to try a cure.

"Why didn't Rhoda come with you?" asked Grover.

Mr. Marple smiled a little wryly. "Well, the truth is, the firm couldn't spare us both. You'd be surprised how she's taken hold. She's my right-hand man."

Grover was surprised, and a little disconcerted. He didn't want Rhoda to be an Amazon.

For the first time he was taking the old man in as an individual, rather than an institution of his childhood. It was curious to realize that he scarcely knew his own godfather.

After dinner they went up to Mr. Marple's private sitting-room, and while lighting a cigarette Grover's

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 attention was drawn to a stack of folders setting forth facts about "Marple's Rubber Roofing."

"What the deuce is rubber roofing?" he asked, and Mr. Marple, lowering himself wearily into his chair, answered the question in words calculated not to bore a young artist who looked askance at commerce and industry.

Grover, touched at this delicacy, was reminded of the days when he had rather highhandedly rejected the older man's tentative offer to take him into business. It occurred to Grover, rather late in the day, that this man, whose ancestors had helped mould the history of his State, was no mere manufacturer: the books in his library, the professors who came to dinner, his membership in committees for the improvement of practically everything!

Surprised by Grover's show of interest, Mr. Marple talked at some length. He had taken advantage of his short stay in Paris to secure French patents for an improved process. He had even had to disguise his tracks like a man in a detective story to outwit a competitor, and the strain had taxed him.

Grover had been glancing through the advertising folders on the table. His impressionistic brain had caught the sense of the propaganda, and he was impatient, for Mr. Marple's sake, at their stilted presentation of it.

"What they need," he said, "is a dash of pictorial fantasy and a literary caress."

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 Mr. Marple smiled indulgently,—a paternal version of Rhoda.

"Roofing is a pretty prosaic proposition," he reminded his godson.

"All the more reason for presenting it poetically," argued Grover, warming to his theme. "A roof's a roof, which nobody can deny. But it's also the thing that shelters a home and keeps it cozy. This—" he flipped his fingers across the uninspired illustration, "is only the top of a house!"

Despite his air of indulgence, the older man was impressed. Though belonging to a cautious generation, his success had been largely due to his willingness to listen to new ideas: witness the leeway he had given to his own daughter, and Grover knew how radical she could be when roused.

"I don't know a thing about rubber roofing, despite all you've just told me," said Grover, "but I'll bet a hat I could turn out a more convincing folder than any of these—words and pictures."

"I'll take you up on that," said Mr. Marple. "Try your hand."

Grover laughed. "Now I'm getting cold feet," he said. But he took the folders away with him and promised to have some exhibits to show Mr. Marple on his return from Germany, several weeks hence.

He left the hotel curiously sad. There was a look in the old man's eyes—the look that had been in his

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 mother's eyes when she had spoken cryptically about "getting on."

And in his own room, as he undressed beside the easel that stood uselessly, its career ended, in a corner, he thought of the transformed Rhoda, her father's right hand man, going after contracts, receiving hardheaded architects and talking them into a cocked hat, dictating thirty letters every morning, short, pointed letters, and tapping her pencil on a mahogany desk-top as she thought of polite ways to jack up a slacking salesman, Rhoda commuting between Aldergrove and Boston with a copy of the Atlantic Monthly under her arm, which she would read not because she enjoyed it but because, being to her fingertips Bostonian, it was her mental duty to do so. Would she ever look pensively through her office window toward the dome of the State House and wonder what new paganisms he was wallowing in? Whenever he thought of Rhoda his mouth was filled with the bitter taste of the misapprehension she had carried away with her. For he had not been able to resist telling her, pent-up as he had been, something of his passion for Olga. And he had colored it in iridiscent tints; he had made a far prettier verbal picture of his love for the French girl than ever he had been able to contrive on canvas. That picture existed now only in Rhoda's mind; and there was no way of effacing it. It was just one of the damned blunders that life was forever leading you into. If his affair with Olga had only led to a con-

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 summation of some sort, no matter how disastrous or how short-lived, there would be at least some justification for the picture; but the whole irony of it was that there was not even for him the memory of that: nothing but an unfulfilled promise.

Next morning the sight of the folders was irksome to him, and for several days his mind showed a perverse inclination to occupy itself with the novel. In the revised version life was not to be quite so tragic; indeed it was to be a tolerably livable sort of thing, with actually enjoyable moments.

Brooding over the false picture in Rhoda's mind encouraged the banished image of Olga to come back, and it was now the friendly Olga, the Olga who had yielded to him in the dance, rather than the stony-faced girl. And one evening, as though the return of the image had been a premonition,—and he had observed that almost no surprising event in life is without some subtle form of premonitory preparation,—he came face to face with her.

In a sense he had asked for it, for, walking home from a theatre near the grands boulevards, he had obeyed an impulse to look in at the cafe in the rue Caumartin, from which he could hear sounds of restrained revelry as he passed the door.

In a corner sat Léon Vaudreuil with Olga and a florid woman whom he did not at first recognize for

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 the shock of seeing Olga, but who, as he proceeded into the room (it was the only thing to do), revealed herself to his staggering faculties as the sublime Kundry, the awesome Elektra. Noémi Janvier, squeezed into a shining black gown, her coarse pink skin dulled with powder, her hemp-like crimson hair showing under a cloth of silver head-dress, was staring up at him, a drop of pomegranate syrup glistening on her chin.

Léon, whom he had not seen for more than a year, greeted him as casually as though they had parted the day before, and Olga was looking at him with steady, veiled eyes, and almost a wistful, and as if forgiving! smile. When women have done you an injury, he had noticed, they always wear a look of injury when you next see them, as if to forestall you.

The accidental encounter with so much of his imaginative past acted as a steadier. It was as though he had suddenly been pushed upon a brilliantly lighted stage, with an audience beneath him before whom he should have to caper briskly or appear ludicrous.

"Monsieur Thanet is from Boston, chère amie," Léon explained, and Mme. Janvier's greenish, calculating, disorderly eyes acknowledged that over and above the monotonously colorful bazar of life, that remnant of fact, in conjunction with the young man's person, was of mild interest.

"Vous êtes bien un Cabot ou un Lowell?" she inquired negligently, in a tone that was not quite insolent and not quite polite.

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 "Neither," Grover replied, suddenly deciding that if his quondam goddess should happen to be in the least interested in ascertaining just who and what he was, she could find out for herself. He was presented to the fourth member of the party, a stolid, heavy-eyed, heavy-nosed Hebraic man of fifty-odd whom they all tutoyé'd,—a M. Nussbaum.

Noémi's eyes roved over the room, pausing a moment on each group in dissatisfaction. It was as though the tempo of life were too slow for her, the rhythms too sluggish, the tones too thin. Her expression was as eloquent as if she had said, Mon Dieu, is there no end to the overwhelming insipidness of everything!

"Dites—Carlotta!" she suddenly called out, as the gray-haired Marchesa appeared at the door, all energy and flame.

They fell upon each other like long lost sisters, and Grover stole a glance at Olga, to see what eyes she had for Peñaverde's old confidante. All he saw was a polite sphinx sitting a little too upright, that she might not have to endure the flabbly proximity of Noémi's new impresario, as Grover guessed M. Nussbaum to be.

With the advent of the Marchesa, Noémi's spirits had risen and she was talking with animation about her plans and her new house at Maisons Lafitte, dominating her corner and vivifying her neighbors

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 as surely and easily as she vivified her co-artists on the stage.

"You must see my house," she was saying to the Marchesa, and struck with a thought that pleased her, she suggested that they all drive out to it, immediately.

As they were rising to leave, Grover attempted to excuse himself, but Mme. Janvier, her enthusiasm embracing even the most inconsequential member of the group, swept him into her plan with a gesture that took obedience for granted. Léon also insisted, in a manner which seemed to imply that he, in return for services rendered, exacted this show of courtesy from one of the few friends who did him credit. It was obvious that Léon knew nothing of his situation with Olga. If he had known, he would only have shrugged it off his shoulders.

As for Olga, she turned to him with a smile, still tinged with forgiveness, and contrived to let him help her with her coat. If only, her eyes said for her, to protect me against this ogre of a Nussbaum to whom I am obliged to be polite.

With cynical feelings in his heart he followed the others into one of the two motors at the door. Whether by accident or design, he found himself seated next to Olga, and as they sped out of Paris in the dark he was filled with panic, for this contact was wakening a savage within him; his old passion was not only being whipped into flames, but was burning out of him the old romantic respect for the divinity

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 of its object. And worst of all Olga was doing nothing whatever to check it. If anything, though one's nerves and senses were in no condition to be trusted, she leaned nearer in response to his uncontrollable encroachment.

They drove through a park and drew up at the door of a small château. Léon had been commissioned to telephone in advance to Noémi's sister, a pinched and bony woman in tweeds to whom everybody, including the servants, seemed to give orders, and there were lights and fires and a well laden buffet to receive them.

When Noémi had taken them through the house they gathered in the salon, and though it was three in the morning she yielded to the plea of the Marchesa, seconded by M. Nussbaum, for music. Playing her own accompaniments, she sang at haphazard a number of songs, including one of the most rapturously applauded items in her concert repertoire, Debussy's La Chevelure. It was hard to believe that the woman who had been talking and laughing so obstreperously in a voice that was raucous and mannish could produce the dull gold thread of sound that rose and fell and lost itself in the vague, sighing tissue of subtle harmonies. Carlotta's eyes, fixed on the singer as she sat in the soft circle of light shed by the piano lamp, fascinated and magnetized, well-ed with tears, and when the song was done Grover, still nursing a litter of cynical feelings, wondered whether the Mar-

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 chesa's own gray locks were the particular chevelure in question: they were very beautiful.

And he marvelled that Noémi with her dauntless eyes and blood-red hair, her big mouth and lascivious arms, Noémi who had seized her opportunities with unerring promptitude, whose contours were magnificently tigerish, whose regrets were heavily scented, whose poetic resignations were in terms of hundred-thousand-dollar compromises with talking machine—companies, could, for all that, so etherealize herself as to sing this song, and a dozen others, with a subconscious regard for its frail charm surpassing that of any artist living.

In his youth she had played a role in his life for which he must be forever grateful. But like the Queen Bee, she had fulfilled her mission, so far as his own hive of ideas was concerned, his own awakening to the romantic promises of life. His ventures into art were the honeycomb, and, even yet, what prodigies of honey might not flow into the cells! The music and the sight of Olga Vaudreuil, who also had dissolved under the spell cast by the great artist, had stirred in him wisps and tag-ends of infinitudes that had long lain dormant. Life begins tomorrow—the old illusion was back, with the old force of conviction.

As a finale Noémi was singing the popular love-song of two seasons back, the ditty with the haunting twist in its rhythm, and he recalled the mood it had evoked in him when he had first heard it on the lips of an

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 unseen beater of carpets, alone in a tiny heart of Paris, wondering what it was like. How many of his vague expectations of it had had their opportunity of fulfillment, and left him still wondering!

"Mais non, voyons!" laughed Noémi when the Marchesa made a move to depart. "Your car is in the garage and your chauffeur asleep. You're all going to stay—naturally."

When Grover was left in his bedroom he became aware that, by accident or design, again he couldn't be sure which and didn't care, Olga was occupying the room next to him. The savage, which Debussy and Noémi had for a time routed, was again in ambush. With a directness that would have taken his breath away, had he merely imagined the scene, instead of enacting it, he gently opened the door between them.

"Ah, it's the Prince!" came a cool voice from under a silken canopy.

suggestions he had discussed with Mr. Marple proved, like so much else in Grover's life, far more easy to enunciate than to demonstrate. For many days he had evaded the issue, but as the time drew near for Mr. Marple's return he forced himself to a study of

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 the proposed layout. Not that he was over-sanguine of his ability to produce an advertisement of any practical value, but simply that he must honor the gentlemanly understanding with himself and his promise to the old man. Of such little punctilios should the life of a good man be made up.

Once started on the process of rewriting the copy, he found it unexpectedly engrossing. For once he was not struggling to bring forth an entirely original conception; his task was to find felicitous clothing for an ill-dressed idea; and his taste in clothing had always been sure.

The first paragraphs he wrote sounded in his own ears a little too playful, but the moment he ceased to be playful he detected a false earnestness in the style which repelled him. As it was only an experiment in any case he decided it best to let his pen wander where it would, and when he had finished two sample pages he was purring with contentment at the result. Any man whose roof was leaking, he reasoned, would be fess than human if this copy didn't take his fancy.

To reinforce the propaganda he drew a series of sketches in the same playful vein, filling in the masses with his resurrected water colors. All this one needs, he reflected, as he cocked his eye at the last sketch, is some of the dicky birds that Casimir rescued from the wreck of my hopes,—and he drew in a telephone wire at the side of the house, from which a choir of little winged Thanets chirped paeans of praise in favor

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 of Marple's Rubber Roofing. And the last touch had hardly been added when he received a telegram from Cologne, making an appointment for dinner two days later.

Many a time had Grover stepped into the rue Truffaut with the old portfolio under his arm, but never had he held it there with such pleasure in its contents. Even the wilted, dark-eyed girls in the laundry seemed to be taking hope from the new jauntiness in his step.

It was almost like having a father of your own, he was thinking, as he walked into the hotel and gave his name at the desk.

A solemn look crossed the face of the clerk, who consulted a colleague in a whisper, then came back. Would Monsieur be good enough to step into the manager's office?

The manager was even more solemn. "It pains me exceedingly to inform you, Monsieur, that M. Marple died an hour after his arrival at the hotel. We have just composed a cable to send to America. Perhaps you will be good enough to confirm the address."

For two days Grover devoted himself to his grim task. Through it all he was borne up by the thought that, in some slight measure, he was rendering Rhoda a service, the first in their long association, which no one else could so fittingly perform. It swept over him, that Rhoda's unforgettable kindness to him at the time of his own bereavement, and the kindness of her poor father, was now tacitly calling for its sequel.

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 Rhoda had cabled her approval of the arrangements he had suggested, and her final message, for all the curtness of its telegraphic style, let him see that she was comforted by his offer to accompany the body to America. In an interval between his hurried arrangements for sailing he had time to wonder whether there might not be a trace of duplicity in his offer; but even so, he argued, it was a benevolent duplicity, and there was nothing to be ashamed of in the feeling of homesickness that had once or twice overtaken him, Even the most rip-roaring bohemian who had ever lived must at moments have had a desire to revisit the scenes of his youth.

But it was a homecoming unlike any he had ever dreamt of: Rhoda standing on the chilly dock, her face white and grave. And the tall young man beside her must be the odd thing that young John had grown into—doubtless excused from St. Basil's.

Together they travelled to Boston, on a train filled with shouting people who were bound for an intercollegiate football game, and the whole pattern of life seemed more than ever a meaningless design. One young man whose head stuck grotesquely out of a racoon coat was betting wildly on the chances of Yale, and if the winning of Yale were to bring about a milennium in which all life's most earnest strivings would receive the crown of success, he couldn't have been more deeply concerned. Young John watched the enthusiasts with a subdued absorption, as though

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 embarrassed by the continual reminder of the Thing which held in check his normal interest in football.

Rhoda was steady and clear-eyed; she had had ten days in which to adjust herself to the new order, and while it was a heavy weight to support, her shoulders were braced to it,—not a gesture or word or action but bore witness to her strength of will and her talent for meeting facts on their own ground. Grover had never seen Rhoda thus reduced to her essentials; always in his past relations with her there had been a margin for banter or a tendency to dart away into some side-path if the road they were treading became dangerous or dull.

"Do you realize," he said to her, when they had changed trains and were coming within sight of the village in which they had been born, "that we are now both grown up, irretrievably?"

"That," agreed Rhoda, "is almost the worst part of all. To know that you've only yourself to look to—for everything. . . It's so much harder for a girl. And a spoiled girl," she added.

"Good Lord, Rhoda!" he protested, "If you call yourself spoiled!"

"Horrid people live in your old house," she informed him, as they drove past his gateway and he looked with a fearful eagerness through the screen of trees. "They have seven children—saucy little brats. Heaven knows where they all sleep."

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 For a fortnight Grover experienced a sort of sombre happiness in picking up the threads of his abandoned life. It was diverting and educative to visit the houses that had oppressed him as a youth and to contrast his present reaction with the earlier. There was much that he had outgrown forever, but also surprisingly much that he could still do with. People are the same the world over, he concluded, on discovering rebel tendencies in the bosom of such rooted New Englanders as the Daggetts and Sipes. What had really annoyed him about Americans, as he viewed them from his artistic perch, was not their want of human understanding, but their ignorance and their bland indifference to aspects of life that happened to engross him. If one were willing to make allowance for that enormous gap, and in his present mood he was willing, there were many points at which one could meet them.

Despite which he knew, as he stood before the white-pillared town hall of Aldergrove, he knew from the look in the eyes of his fellow-citizens, that his silhouette against that dignified old edifice was incongruously alien. He had left more than his trunks behind him when he had sailed for America; he had left a part of him which he still felt to be the major part.

Rhoda, able as ever to read him by signs, had come home from her office one evening and found him at the piano, playing in a manner which prompted her to say, when she had laid aside her hat and installed

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 herself before the tea-kettle, "So you're on your ocean again!"

She had said it with a smile, but in a tone which vividly recalled the evenings at the Cafe International when Marthe had gently chided him for being in the moon.

"What am I to do about it?" he asked, joining her at the table, "for I suppose it's true."

"Far be it from me to make suggestions," she said. "I've learned a lot of lessons."

Though the words were ambiguous, Grover had a clear sense of their drift. The truth of the matter was that Rhoda had long since begun to take him at his word—at his five-syllable words! During the last strenuous year, acquiring the philosophy of a woman of business, she had accepted the conception of a Grover Thanet whose new maturity was bound up with the gratifications of creative accomplishment, who had repudiated New England and who was establishing his identity in the world of art. And this conception was all the more firmly planted in her mind for the fact that he had never told her that he had abjured painting, nor that he had himself been working in an office as long, or longer than she. As yet it was too early to tell her about his literary hopes, for he didn't dare tempt Providence again. Instead he wrote feverishly, in secret, while she was away from home.

The fact that he had nothing but an alien silhouette to show for his years of soul-searching was a con-

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 tinuous torture to him in this house built on the foundations of conscientious endeavor. He was obliged to maintain a pose, and it went against his grain to pose before Rhoda, who was the soul of candor. It wouldn't have been so difficult if Rhoda had merely tacitly accepted his hypothetical status as a painter of promise and a master pagan; but she backed him up in the role, introducing him with transparent pride, though Grover suspected that it had cost her a good deal to admit to her friends what changes had taken place in him. Perhaps, he reflected, she had taken his rejections of her more to heart than anyone had realized; perhaps her only means of reconciling herself to her disappointment was in the exaggeration of his remoteness from all that made up her own life. On the other hand, perhaps grief and business cares were rendering her indifferent: that would account for the impersonality of the kindness she showed him, the hundred and one casual attentions that a good hostess and a generous friend never lose sight of.

Something had happened to Rhoda. Either deliberately or inadvertently she had blinded herself. Except where her business was concerned; for business had crystallized her, pared, sheared, and whittled. Even her physical contours were finer, and hardened as though in a glazing oven.

"Why don't you run into town for a day or two?" she suggested one morning as he stood at the window watching the rain on the snow.

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 The suggestion irritated him, because behind it he suspected a polite fear on Rhoda's part that he was chafing at the lack of some pagan joy or other that he might, on the quiet, recapture at a stage door. How make Rhoda understand, without offending her by venturing on such topics, that nothing on earth tempted him so little as that thought!

She had never referred, even by a hint, to the love affair he had half confessed to her, in vague iridiscent phrases. Yet it was always there between them, on the breakfast table, at dinner, when he played the piano, when they walked along the wintry beach with half a dozen dogs at their feet. In Rhoda's mind was doubtless the image of a gay abode of love, something excessively French, like the illustrations in La Vie Parisienne,—young Mr. Thanet all tangled up on a divan with a nymph who smelt of chypre and had corduroy colored hair. For "corduroy," Grover reflected, with his morbidly accurate intuition, would have stuck; to her dying day Rhoda would not forget that touch. And he bitterly thought of the morning at Maisons Lafitte when he had returned to sit on the edge of the bed technically allotted to him in Noémi Janvier's tolerant house, spent and cold, the savage appeased and contemptuous, Into Noémi's house he had brought a flame that had been fanned during a long year, with which to consume his last romantic illusion. Olga, like his other hopes and aspirations, had gone stale through waiting. For as he had sat

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 on the edge of his own bed, in the bleak morning, he stared straight at the fact that the girl he had enshrined was merely a bad copy of his image of her; that she had changed from poetry to prose and didn't scan any more. The magic cloak was gone. And if he were to give in to a deep yearning to tell all these things to Rhoda—then forever and forever the magic cloak which had seemed to shroud him in her eyes would be gone. And life just wasn't worth living if all the magic went.

Business, though it had crystallized Rhoda, had at any rate not robbed her of her femininity; in some ways she was more feminine than ever, as he was more masculine. It's merely the effect of being grown up, he guessed. In one emergency she broke her custom and discussed the affairs of the office with him. With the death of her father a reorganization of the firm was a foregone conclusion, and as his will had left a controlling interest in her hands, her judgment was being taxed to the utmost. There were rivalries, enmities, and traps. One man who knew secrets of great value was threatening to keep them to himself unless his unreasonable terms were granted. At that point Rhoda had bent under the strain of her responsibility and laid the situation before Grover. In a flash he brushed aside the technical complications and judged the case from the moral and psychological point of view.

"Give him a categorical offer," he advised, "and if

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 he refuses, turn him out, secrets and all. For if you keep him on his terms he will always be a centre of disaffection, and as for the secrets, there aren't any that can't be rediscovered or invented anew, especially under the aegis of such an ingenious and energetic young woman as yourself." Faith, hope, and charity, he again reflected, and the greatest was assuredly faith—and Rhoda had it in abundance, lucky Rhoda.

This was support in a direction parallel with Rhoda's own endeavors since her connection with the firm, and also a tribute from a source from which she had too often in the past drawn only criticism. What do girls know anyway! The childish taunt had often been echoed.

"Do you really think I'm any good?" she asked, with an air of helplessness that was far from habitual.

"You know perfectly well that I've been in a continuous state of flabbergastion at what I've seen you doing," he replied. "Even before I read the interview."

This was an allusion to an article in a trade journal celebrating the phenomenal rise of young Miss Marple to the presidency of one of the leading manufacturing companies in the State. Frances, home for the Christmas holidays, had found it in Rhoda's bedroom and come running downstairs two steps at a time crying, "Look! Look! That's my big sister!"

It had been agreed that Grover couldn't think of leaving before the New Year. As a matter of fact his

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 return to Paris had been postponed several times, for reasons which were never entirely definite but which everyone, including himself, accepted without question—indeed with enthusiasm.

"What on earth are those?" asked Rhoda one Sunday morning when he had remained in bed with a cold and she had come in to see that he had had a suitable breakfast.

She was pointing to a heap of papers that he had neglected to replace in his portfolio, and for a moment he thought she was referring to the novel about how tragic life was, and was groping frantically in his mind for an alibi, when he raised himself on his pillow and saw that she was holding the sketches he had made for her father.

"What darling little birds!" she laughed, and then, as she glanced through the other sketches, her astonishment grew.

Grover had meant to show them to her but had postponed the occasion, to avoid the inevitable pain for her, and had ended by overlooking their existence. He explained how they had come into being.

Rhoda forgot her interest in his breakfast, and while he balanced the heavy tray on his thighs she lost herself in the playful propaganda he had written with a pen to which he had given carte blanche.

No one had ever looked at his portraits and land-

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 scapes with the spontaneous pleasure with which Rhoda was studying these drawings. No one had ever read any words of his with the whimsical delight with which Rhoda scanned his persuasive arguments.

Her enthusiasm became electric. It set her to pacing the room and gesturing in a manner that would have given Mamie Mangum pointers for a dozen roles.

"It's brimming over with ideas," she cried. "However did you—"

She leaned forward over the breakfast tray and hugged him.

"It's worth thousands of dollars to us," she exclaimed with a new gust of amazement.

"I'll take it in cash," he said laconically, as the dark shadow of Paris stole into the cheerful room.

"By Jove and you'll get it," she promised.

He did get it, shortly after the New Year, and it gave him courage to re-enter his bank. He had got into the way of journeying into Boston with Rhoda and had looked up a few old acquaintances. Most of his classmates he soon rejected as hopeless marriers. Scarcely one but had at least one foot in the matrimonial grave. Eric Peperell was selling stocks and bonds and was by way of being engaged to a girl named Lila Squarebriggs.

"I should think she'd marry anybody to change that name," Grover commented. "Why victimize a good fellow like Eric!"

"Lila's a nice girl," Rhoda defended.

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 Grover gave her a sidelong glance, for he suspected Lila of being what Sophie had once called a pis aller. "I used to think Eric was sweet on you," he ventured. "He always had a sort of gone look in his eye when your name came on the carpet."

"He was—a little," she admitted.

"Only a little?"

"Well, quite a lot."

"I don't see how you kept from jumping at him."

"I'm married to my job," she said succinctly.

And for some reason, rather drearily, that led to the question of his return to France.

"There's only one thing I'm waiting for now," he informed her.

"What is that?"

"A letter from Geoffrey Saint."

He couldn't explain to her that he had dispatched to Geoffrey the manuscript of a novel, a revised version of a recalcitrant story on which he had been working for goodness knew how long, and if he had told her, he wouldn't have been able to add that his nervous system was laboring under the strain of a possible adverse criticism. To himself he had admitted that if he were to fall down in this attempt, there would be nothing left. All his faith in himself would then seem to him as empty as the boyishly vaunting phrases he had come across only a few days since when, in pulling out a book from a shelf in the library, he had found between the leaves one of his old letters to

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 Rhoda, and, with flaming cheeks, forced his way through the naive, bombastic contents. Contents which Rhoda had no doubt taken quite literally! One sentence in particular reduced him to the lowest degree of shame: When I do return to America, it will only be after I have proved to myself, and to the public, that I'm Somebody.

Despite Geoffrey's faithful promptitude, it seemed weeks before the manuscript came back. Grover went up to his own room to open it and to read the accompanying letter.

He was in his room for hours,—not reading the letter, for that had soon been perused; but thinking, and blowing smoke toward the ceiling, and wishing the world had a back door that he could sneak out of.

For it was the same old story. Though Geoffrey was kind—oh, so kind! which made it damnably worse, he allowed him only a nice little talent again.

"Put it away for two or three years and forget about it," Geoffrey counselled. "Then, if you reread it impersonally, I think you will see what I mean."

"Affectionately yours," Geoffrey concluded.

Affectionately hell, echoed Grover in his misery, wondering whether Rhoda's estimate of Geoffrey Saint might not have a shade of truth in it. "That man," she had once remarked, "is an incorrigible old prisstail—I don't see why you hang on his opinions the way you do."

At dinner he rallied his courage. Folly Daggett and

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 her husband, a dull, safe young man, were present, also Alcie Pender and a dashing Brazilian for whom, Rhoda had told him, Alcie was thinking of divorcing Dick Briarcliffe—already. Massachusetts trying to be France, Grover reflected, with a thought for the greater ease with which such transfers were effected in Biarritz.

"I bet a yelping doughnut you never go back," Folly challenged him.

"You've lost," he replied. "For I'm sailing next week."

Rhoda subdued her surprise, but Grover felt that she could see straight through him to his innermost weakness, though she might have no factual clue.

"You got your letter?" she inquired, and to her guests it might seem that the letter had come from the most important art committee in Paris, impatient of his delay.

He nodded his head, and parried Folly's questions as to what boat he was sailing on and what prospects there were of a send-off party.

When they had all gone, and there was nobody in the house but himself and Rhoda and her self-effacing Aunt Sarita who spent most of her evenings in the rooms to which Rhoda had once unsuspectingly—or suspectingly?—offered Sophie Scantleberry the keys, Rhoda came to him in the old sisterly way.

"I suppose it's no use to argue," she inquired.

He shook his head. "I must go," he said, not in

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 the ecstatic tone in which he had said it some two years before, but as though it were the grimmest of duties.

Rhoda sighed, as his mother had been wont to sigh on occasions when she felt the force of his stubbornness but was too fond of him to offend the pride which prompted his folly.

In the last few days, and tonight particularly, he had caught in Rhoda's regard a new light. It was as though she detected him in a role, without being able to challenge it at any point,—not that she would be cruel enough to do so, even if the clue had been in her hands. The old, girlish Rhoda might have been thoughtless enough to tweak him in a sensitive area, but not this womanly Rhoda.

"I have so many things to do there," he added, rather lamely.

They said good-night, having arranged that he would accompany her to the city in the morning, to look up sailings.

Late in the afternoon he called at Rhoda's office. For some minutes he was kept waiting in the reception room, and when he entered he found her in a state of wrath which transformed her. Jeanne, Marshall of France, thought Grover, with the battle in full swing.

"For God's sake, what's the matter?" he asked.

"Oh, nothing!" she said. "I've just had to fire a

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 darn good man who got too big for his damn boots, that's all."

"It's enough," he sympathized.

"Enough!" she echoed, dropping into her chair and reaching for a cigarette. "It's the limit! No sooner do you get things running smoothly than somebody goes and upsets your applecart—each apple so carefully placed. And all to do over again."

Grover sat in commiserating silence.

"Did you find out about boats?" she asked.

"Got my ticket."

Rhoda was flicking off the ash of her cigarette with a nervous vigor not entirely called for.

"Life's an awful fake," she remarked.

He looked at her in amazement. "Good Lord, Rhoda! Don't you say that. You're the only person left who, I always supposed, thought life—real and earnest and the grave is not its goal!"

"It's just one long fake, I tell you! When you're a little girl you dress yourself up in your mother's clothes and try to act like a lady; and when you're a lady and are trying to act like a decent man and a nasty big brute comes in and tries to double-cross you and not only that—"

"You mean—make love?"

She flicked her ash, then crushed the fire out of her cigarette. "And of course it would have to be the one man I was counting on."

"What for?"

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 "Oh, I don't know. He had brains and—well, taste. He was the first to catch the possibilities of your little ideas. Business is business, but nowadays you have to disguise it. They want a light touch. The sort of thing you do so well—like the way your little birds have their heads cocked."

And the way my cheek used to go from the corner of my eye to my chin and probably doesn't any more and never will again, Grover was ruminating, stroking it absent-mindedly.

He looked up at her with a timid surmise. "I couldn't be of any use to you, could I? What's it all about?"

Rhoda was out of her chair now, pacing the floor. We've missed our train, he thought, as he heard Rhoda's secretary close the outer door. Suddenly she stopped before him, and looked at him with a steady regard, just daring to be hopeful.

"Would you?" she asked, a little breathlessly.

"Would I what?"

"Be a sort of adviser for a few months, to—to tide us over? . . . Fred Shadrock was advertising manager, but I've decided to be that myself from now on."

"Like Mussolini," Grover remarked, to key down the tension.

"What we need," Rhoda went on, thinking her way through, "is a man who's not too close to the wheels—who can stand off and squint his eyes and see what's

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 needed. Experience isn't as important as common sense, which almost nobody's got, and imagination, which just almost doesn't exist. The rest of us can do the controlling of the imagination and the laying on of dampers. Of course—"

Then Rhoda stopped in her tracks. She burst out laughing, a little hysterically, and reached for another cigarette.

"Fancy us two!" she cried. "Talking like this . . . me with my eye on the roofs of the cockeyed world, and you there, half-way to France. . . Let's go out and have some tea. I'm starving."

The Prince there, Grover was musing, who sits and thinks—his air palace blown galley-west.

He rose unsteadily to his feet. If he died of the shame, he must relieve his conscience before Rhoda. After it was all said he could sail away, and spend the rest of his brief days drinking anis del oso.

She sat down again, and it was his turn to walk the room. In a turbulent stream he poured it all out—Casimir's verdict, the desperate tomato salads, Olga, Italy, the job, the novel, Geoffrey's letter, Noémi, Olga again. He didn't spare himself nor Rhoda. Indeed, beneath all his eloquence, he wondered if he might perhaps be overstating the case. Getting it all said half suggested solutions!

But he went on and on, long after the charwomen in the outer office had performed their evening tasks

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 and left them alone, strangely quiet in this towering temple of commerce.

The lights outside were reflecting themselves in cold puddles of water on the Common, and he was on his knees, his head in Rhoda's comforting lap. Once or twice there was a warm splash on the back of his hand. It seemed to him that after this night there would be nothing left for him that he could face without flinching—not even the dingiest cafe in Paris.

"Until you found someone," he heard himself grotesquely saying, and for the life of him he couldn't pin the remark to anything that had gone before.

She was stroking his hair, "I'll never find anyone," she said, "If I wait forever. There just isn't any substitute. It's silly to say it, but it's true."

He looked up, and saw her eyes moist and shining in the murky light. "But when you've found the right man for the job?"

"About that time," she said, "you'll have finished a new novel in five syllables."

"Oh, do you think so?"

"I'm afraid I think so," she ruefully confessed.

"Meanwhile?"

"Meanwhile you'll be doing one-syllable things for us."

"Do you think we ought to get married, or anything?"

"I do," whispered Rhoda, and the whisper turned

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 into a devastating sob. "I just can't bear it any longer."

"What will Sophie say!"

And to his eternal amazement Rhoda uttered a single word, one of the coarsest in the language, and most expressive.

A few weeks later Grover composed a careful reply to Geoffrey's letter. As he chewed the pen he pictured Geoffrey securely stationed upon his rostrum at an important western university, Doctor Saint every inch of him, handing down pronouncements that it would take the brighter of his students years and years to discover the fallacy of!

"I cannot but feel," wrote Grover, "that you have failed a little to catch the purport of my book." He paused, wondering with a wild flare of hope whether his novel, like Racicot's music and Casimir's painting, might not have some deep-hidden significance, too deep even for himself! "Not that I think it would be published as it stands; but after all, dear old Geoffrey, there are views—but let's not go into that." He was about to add, "and a new spirit in the land," but it might be as well not to go into that either, for young men in every generation had imagined themselves discovering a new spirit which was without doubt the same old one.

"For the time being I've drained Paris dry. It may

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 age you to learn that your quondam tutee is married—it may even kill you: it ought to kill somebody; I know it would of me, a year ago! But I thought it all out, and even though a hot wave of matrimony sometimes sweeps over me and threatens to swamp the coracle my soul believed itself destined to set sail in—

"What I'm trying to say, Geoffrey, is that at best life's only a series of consolation prizes, and you're a fool if you reject even them! Or is that cynicism?

"Whatever it is, it sounds a little disparaging toward Rhoda, and that's a pity, for everybody knows she'd be a grand first prize if that's what you were trying to win.

"Casimir put his finger on it when he ignored my arty allegories and pinned his faith on my cats. He knew what I now suspect: that I'm only expected to be somebody who's not too big for his boots. I hate being him—but Rhoda, who just looked over my shoulder and kissed me on the ear said I be him quite satisfactorily—so you see!

"It's just like at the bank. I'm forever spending the cheque that won't be deposited till next quarter. And that's what I did with my future; I overdrew my account a little, and have to wait to catch up. Meanwhile? Meanwhile I know this: that while accepting as gratefully as may be whatever the moment vouchsafes, I shall always secretly, passionately be yearning for the unknown. I was born with a will o' the wisp complex—when I fell in love I adored a phantom girl;

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 the faith that animates me and projects me toward bridges I can't cross till I come to them is a faith that centres around a phantom Me; whatever knowledge I possess is derived from a phantom past; my hopes are fixed on a phantom future. Phantoms is all I can ever be sure of, for which and all Thy other blessings—

"It's like Alice's jam: poetry yesterday, poetry tomorrow, but only prose today. The thing to do, I suppose, is to take hold of life and make the damn thing scan, inexorable gods notwithstanding. Indeed I have a suspicion that the gods are a fairly exorable crew if you meet them on their own terms. Having been created by man in his image, they're rather worldly—that's all."

When he had finished the letter and reread it, in the solitude of his room, a wave, not of matrimony, but of remorse or grief or something in the same general category which eluded his powers of definition, a wave that simmered and hissed a little ominously, surged up in him, and he added a postscript in a calligraphy so hurried and inky he feared Geoffrey might not be able to decipher it—literally or figuratively.

"I've just caught my poor old subconscious at it again, chanting more plaintively than ever, Why did he die? Why did he die? And oh, Geoffrey, would you say it's because I killed him?"

Why did he die? It sounded like a title!

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8

Fourthly, for ♀ and ☿ the two Inferiors, their eeming ☌☉ in the middle of their direction will be found to be a real ☍🌑 and their ☌☉ in the middle of their Retrogradation a real ☌🌑, yet without any difference in the time.

More then this, they will be found to have a ⚹□ and △ to the Earth, even as the three Superiors have, beides a □△ and ☍ each to other, all which Apects our Ephemerides would make them incapable of. Many other particular deductions and differences I might name; which becaue thee will light you to the corner where they are, and I have circumcribed my elf into a narrow room, I hall omit. So that hence it will plainly appear in all reaon, That

This which we here propound to be calculated and collected, although hitherto it hath not (I may ay through negligence) been put in practice, is the onely true doctrine of Apects, and the onely ound foundation of Atrology.

I am the more inclined to believe this, that o much reaon doth already dictate and confirm, when I conider the weaknes and hifts of the old Atrology.

Weaknes, in that all the Predictions (or at leat 99 in a hundred) of the old Atrology, which notwithtand- ing


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Comrades, we must examine the situation in which this discussion commenced.

We are all agreed that we have suffered a severe defeat. I think it is an exaggeration to say that we have suffered disaster, but still, the reverse was serious. Our experience is that this is the best test for every revolutionary party and every party policy, and precisely during this defeat must we undergo this test. If we lose heart and paint everything in the darkest colours, then the Party may indeed break up. Now in the time of reverse, every German comrade must show of what he is capable. It is quite easy to be in a good mood during victory, but it is during this period of difficulty that we must show faith in the Party.

Just one word before going into the essentials of the subject. It has been said here that a split in the German Communist Party would mean the collapse of the German Revolution, or at least that the Revolution would be postponed for five years. This is absolutely true. For that reason I think that we must enter into the discussion determined that who ever, irrespective of persons, in the spirit of factionalism, even if out of conviction, threatens the unity of the Party at this particular stage, must be branded as committing a crime against the German working class. Situations arise in which we must be prepared to split, and we have had splits, but situations also arise when we must put up with anything to avoid a split. I assert that we have just such a situation now in Germany. Whoever at this moment is aiming at a split, even from conviction, is objectively aiding the Social-Democrats and the bourgeoisie, and not the German working class.

And now to the essentials of the discussion.

It is attempted to assert here: October was not a mistake, we have not under-estimated, but it was before that, in the beginning of the Ruhr crisis that the present situation arose.

Of course, had we begun to make preparations at the opening of the Ruhr crisis, we would have been much better prepared, and the earlier we would have made our preparations the better it would have been. But this kind of argument can be stretched quite a long way. It is a sophism to endeavour to conceal the error at the point where it was actually committed. We must be honest to ourselves, and if we are we shall discover the error.

The picture which Comrade Koenig described of the incident between the German women and the French soldiers, was interesting. Indeed, the Ruhr situation was the starting point of the whole business.

I have before me the instructions of the Executive to the Communist Delegation of the Frankfurt Conference of March 17, 1923. What did we say?


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 "The Essen Conference was mainly a demonstration conference. The conference of March 17 must be a working conference."

In the circumstances under which the Essen Conference was held even a demonstration was a great political event. The more or less successful co-ordination of the activities of the French and German Communist Parties in connection with the occupation of the Ruhr must not be under-estimated. Merely to repeat the Essen affair at this moment, however, would mean a step backwards. The conference of March 17, and particularly the preliminary conference, have two tasks to perform.

Then follows a whole chapter dealing with the tasks of the French Party.

Consequently, the Executive saw the tasks ahead, and pointed them out to the Conference. That these tasks. were badly fulfilled, in spite of the fact that the youth in France are now well trained, can, if you will, now be asserted. We have done this sufficiently, but we must not reduce this to a sophism; that because we did not at that time raise the question of armed revolt, therefore, the mistake was committed at that time.

No, the mistake in October was due to the German Party and partly also due to the Executive.

On the question of fixing a date, Comrade Trotsky wrote an article in which he raised the point of a time-table.

That was a mistake. I must say that Radek was opposed to this.

(: I, too.)

Brandler, too. We decided that the date should be fixed merely for our orientation, and that the question must be settled in Germany. Therefore the question of the date was not a mistake on the part of the Executive or on the part of the Russian Party. We decided in the proper way.

Let me quote to you another document, Our telegram of October 1, 1928, concerning Saxony:—

"As we have estimated that the decisive moment will arrive not later than four, five, or six weeks, we consider it necessary that every position that can bring immediate advantage be occupied. In view of the situation, the question of our entry into the Saxony Government must be raised practically. We must enter on the condition that the Zeigner people are really prepared to defend Saxony against Bavaria and the Fascists, the immediate arming of 50,000 to 60,000, and that General Muller be ignored. The same to apply to Thuringen."

This is a telegram that was decided on in the presence of Brandler. Was it correct, or not? It was absolutely correct,


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 Rh So in speaking of the new compulsory labor armies under military discipline Trotzky said at the same congress:

As to the workmen, Trotzky said:

The Soviet scheme of compulsory labor is being applied on such a broad scale and is so boldly presented as a "proletarian" scheme that it constitutes the gravest danger that has confronted labor for centuries. It is undoubtedly destined to become historic. It is therefore well worth while to present at somewhat greater length the extraordinary reasoning by which Trotzky and Lenin seek to defend it. The first full justification was presented by Trotzky to the Communist Party Congress in March, 1920, and was published in the official Soviet organ of Moscow on the 21st. Its most important points are perhaps the following:

At the present time the militarization of labor is all the more needed in that we have now come to the


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 80 mobilization of peasants as the means of solving the problems requiring mass action. We are mobilizing the peasants and forming them into labor detachments which very closely resemble military detachments.

Some of our comrades say, however, that even though in the case of the working power of mobilized peasantry it is necessary to apply militarization, a military apparatus need not be created when the question involves skilled labor and industry because there we have professional (labor) unions performing the function of organizing labor. This opinion, however, is erroneous. …

We have in the most important branches of our industry more than a million workmen on the lists, but not more than eight hundred thousand of them are actually working, and where are the remainder? They have gone to the villages or to other divisions of industry or into speculation. Among soldiers this is called desertion, and, in one form or another, the measures used to compel soldiers to do their duty should be applied in the field of labor.

Under a unified system of economy the masses of workmen should be moved about, ordered and sent from place to place in exactly the same manner as soldiers. This is the foundation of the militarization of labor, and without this we are unable to speak seriously of any organization of industry on a new basis in the conditions of starvation and disorganization existing today.

In the period of transition in the organization of labor compulsion plays a very important part. The statement that free labor, namely, freely employed labor, produces more than labor under compulsion is correct only when applied to feudalistic and bourgeois orders of society.

Later in the year in an article republished by the official Bolshevist organ in America, Soviet Russia, Trotzky explains at length that compulsory labor is the backbone of Soviet communism. According to Trotzky


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 Rh Russia is in a period of transition to communist socialism which must last many years. He says:

Trotzky asserts that compulsory labor is the very foundation of the Soviet State and that it will have to remain the basis until the coming generation through compulsion, terror, and the Bolshevist press and school monopoly (which Trotzky calls education) has converted the population into communism. This is the view expressed in the "theses" which he presented to the Economic Congress on January 24, 1920. One of these "theses" is the following:


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 82

Noteworthy in this "thesis" is the fact that any element of the working class which the communists may be pleased to designate as "backward" is to be treated the same as the Russian agriculturists or peasants, i.e., the same as the outlawed "bourgeois."

By such arguments Trotzky defends also the introduction of the Taylor system, bonuses, etc.:

Yet one of the slogans by which the Bolshevists tricked labor into that measure of support they needed to get


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Rh after they had held their peace, James answered, saying, Men and brethren, hearken unto me: 14. Simeon hath declared how God at the first did visit the Gentiles, to take out of them a people for his name. 15. And to this agree the words of the prophets; as it is written, 16. After this I will return, and will build again the tabernacle Of David, which is fallen down; and I will build again the ruins thereof, and I will set it up: 17. That the residue of men might seek after the Lord, and all the Gentiles, upon whom my name is called, saith the Lord, who doeth all these things. 18. Known unto God are all his works from the beginning of the world. 19. Wherefore my sentence is, that we trouble not them, which from among the Gentiles are turned to God: 20. But that we write unto them, that they abstain from pollutions of idols, and from fornication, and from things strangled, and from blood. 21. For Moses of old time hath in every, city them that preach him, being read in the synagogues every sabbath-day.

We have here a council called, not by writ, but by consent, on this occasion; (v. 6.) The apostles and presbyters came together, to consider of this matter. They did not give their judgment separately, but came together to do it, that they might hear one another's sense in this matter; for in the multitude of counsellors there is safety and satisfaction. They did not give their judgment rashly, but considered of this matter. Though they were clear concerning it in their own minds, yet they would take time to consider of it, and to hear what was to be said by the adverse party. Nor did the apostles give their judgment concerning it without the elders, the inferior ministers, to whom they thus condescended, and on whom they thus put an honour. Those that are most eminent in gifts and graces, and are in the most exalted stations in the church, ought to shew respect to their juniors and inferiors; for though days should speak, yet there is a spirit in man, Job 32. 7, 8. Here is a direction to the pastors of the churches, when difficulties arise, to come together in solemn meetings for mutual advice and encouragement, that they may know one another's mind, and strengthen one another's hand, and may act in concert.

Now here we have,

I. Peter's speech in this synod. He did not in the least pretend to any primacy or headship in this synod; he was not master of this assembly, nor so much as chairman, or moderator pro hac vice—on this occasion; for we do not find that either he spake first, to open the synod, (there having been much disputing before he rose up,) nor that he spake last, to sum up the cause and collect the suffrages; but he was a faithful, prudent, zealous member of this assembly, and offered that which was very much to the purpose, and which would come better from him than from another, because he had himself been the first that preached the gospel to the Gentiles. There had been much disputing, pro and con, upon this question, and liberty of speech allowed, as ought to be in such cases; those of the sect of the Pharisees were some of them present, and allowed to say what they could in defence of those of their opinion at Antioch, which probably was answered by some of the elders: such questions ought to be fairly disputed before they are decided. When both sides had been heard, Peter rose up, and addressed himself to the assembly, Men and brethren, as did James afterward, v. 13. And here,

1. He put them in mind of the call and commission he had some time ago to preach the gospel to the Gentiles; he wondered there should be any difficulty made of a matter already settled: "Ye know that —from the beginning of the days of the gospel, many years ago, God made choice among us apostles of one to preach the gospel to the Gentiles, and I was the person chosen, that the Gentiles by my mouth should hear the word, and believe, v. 7. Ye know I was questioned about it, and cleared myself to universal satisfaction; every body rejoiced that God had granted to the Gentiles repentance unto life, and nobody said a word of circumcising them, nor was there any thought of such a thing. (See ch. 11. 18.) Why should the Gentiles who hear the word of the gospel by Paul's mouth, be compelled to submit to circumcision, any more than those that heard it by my mouth? Or why should the terms of their admission now be made harder than they were then?"

2. He puts them in mind how remarkably God owned him in preaching to the Gentiles, and gave testimony to their sincerity in embracing the christian faith; (v. 8.) "God, who knows the hearts, and therefore is able to judge infallibly of men, he bore them witness that they were his indeed, by giving them the Holy Ghost; not only the graces and comforts, but the extraordinary miraculous gifts, of the Holy Ghost, even as he did unto us apostles." See ch. 11. 15—17. Note, (1.) The Lord knows them that are his, for he knows men's hearts; and we are as our hearts are. (2.) Those to whom God gives the Holy Ghost, he thereby bears witness to that they are his ; hence we are said to be sealed with that Holy Spirit of promise, marked for God.

God had bid the Gentiles welcome to the privilege of communion with him, without requiring them to be circumcised, and to keep the law; and therefore shall not we admit them into communion with us but upon those terms? v. 9. God has put no difference between us and them: they, though Gentiles, are as welcome to the grace of Christ and the throne of grace as we Jews are; why then should we set them at a distance, as if we were holier than they? Isa. 65. 5. Note, We ought not to make any conditions of our brethren's acceptance with us, but such as God has made the conditions of their acceptance with him, Rom. 14. 3. Now the Gentiles were fitted for communion with God, in having their hearts purified by faith, and that faith God's own work in them; and therefore why should we think them unfit for communion with us, unless they will submit to the ceremonial purifying enjoined by the law to us? Note, [1.] By faith the heart is purified; we are not only justified, and conscience purified, but the work of sanctification is begun and carried on. [2.] Those that have their hearts purified by faith, therein are made so nearly to resemble one another, that, whatever other difference there may be between them, no account is to be made of it; for the faith of all the saints is alike precious, and has like precious effects; (2 Pet 1. 1.) and they that by it are united to Christ, are so to look upon themselves as joined to one another, as that all distinctions, even that between Jew and Gentile, are immerged and swallowed up in it.

3. He sharply reproves those teachers (some of whom, it is likely, were present) who went about to bring the Gentiles under the obligation of the law of Moses, v. 10. The thing is so plain, that he cannot forbear speaking of it with some warmth;


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 Rh themselves into power was precisely the abolition of the bonus system. In November, 1917, Lenin said: "The bonus system is a heritage of the capitalistic regime and we repudiate it." And now we see the bonus system not only restored but established in places where it did not exist before.

Another promise to labor by which the Bolshevists were helped into power was a shorter working day. Now they have made long hours and Sunday work compulsory:

A report at the Russian Trade Union Congress of 1920 declared that the flight to the villages was so great that the proletariat was disappearing, melting away. Surely a rather serious state of affairs under the "dictatorship of the proletariat!" The official representative of the Petrograd labor unions in one of their resolutions declared:


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nine next morning the two canoes were installed on a light country cart at Étreux: and we were soon following them along the side of a pleasant valley full of hop-gardens and poplars. Agreeable villages lay here and there on the slope of the hill; notably, Tupigny, with the hop-poles hanging their garlands in the very street, and the houses clustered with grapes. There was a faint enthusiasm on our passage; weavers put their heads to the windows; children cried out in ecstasy at sight of the two "boaties"—barquettes: and bloused pedestrians, who were acquainted with our charioteer, jested with him on the nature of his freight.

We had a shower or two, but light and flying.


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 The air was clean and sweet among all these green fields and green things growing. There was not a touch of autumn in the weather. And when, at Vadencourt, we launched from a little lawn opposite a mill, the sun broke forth and set all the leaves shining in the valley of the Oise.

The river was swollen with the long rains. From Vadencourt all the way to Origny, it ran with ever quickening speed, taking fresh heart at each mile, and racing as though it already smelt the sea. The water was yellow and turbulent, swung with an angry eddy among half-submerged willows, and made an angry clatter along stony shores. The course kept turning and turning in a narrow and well-timbered valley. Now, the river would approach the side, and run griding along the chalky base of the hill, and show us a few open colza fields among the trees. Now, it would skirt the garden-walls of


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 houses, where we might catch a glimpse through a doorway, and see a priest pacing in the chequered sunlight. Again, the foliage closed so thickly in front, that there seemed to be no issue; only a thicket of willows, overtopped by elms and poplars, under which the river ran flush and fleet, and where a kingfisher flew past like a piece of the blue sky. On these different manifestations, the sun poured its clear and catholic looks. The shadows lay as solid on the swift surface of the stream as on the stable meadows. The light sparkled golden in the dancing poplar leaves, and brought the hills into communion with our eyes. And all the while the river never stopped running or took breath; and the reeds along the whole valley stood shivering from top to toe.

There should be some myth (but if there is, I know it not) founded on the shivering of the reeds. There are not many things in nature more


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 striking to man's eye. It is such an eloquent pantomime of terror; and to see such a number of terrified creatures taking sanctuary in every nook along the shore, is enough to infect a silly human with alarm. Perhaps they are only acold, and no wonder, standing waist deep in the stream. Or perhaps they have never got accustomed to the speed and fury of the river's flux, or the miracle of its continuous body. Pan once played upon their forefathers; and so, by the hands of his river, he still plays upon these later generations down all the valley of the Oise; and plays the same air, both sweet and shrill, to tell us of the beauty and the terror of the world.

The canoe was like a leaf in the current. It took it up and shook it, and carried it masterfully away, like a Centaur carrying off a nymph. To keep some command on our direction, required hard and diligent plying of the paddle. The


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 river was in such a hurry for the sea! Every drop of water ran in a panic, like as many people in a frightened crowd. But what crowd was ever so numerous, or so single-minded? All the objects of sight went by at a dance measure; the eyesight raced with the racing river; the exigencies of every moment kept the pegs screwed so tight, that our being quivered like a well-tuned instrument; and the blood shook off its lethargy, and trotted through all the highways and byeways of the veins and arteries, and in and out of the heart, as if circulation were but a holiday journey, and not the daily moil of three score years and ten. The reeds might nod their heads in warning, and with tremulous gestures, tell how the river was as cruel as it was strong and cold, and how death lurked in the eddy underneath the willows. But the reeds had to stand where they were; and those who stand still are always timid advisers. As for us, we


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 An Inland Voyage. could have shouted aloud. If this lively and beautiful river were, indeed, a thing of death's contrivance, the old ashen rogue had famously outwitted himself with us. I was living three to the minute. I was scoring points against him every stroke of my paddle, every turn of the stream. I have rarely had better profit of my life.

For I think we may look upon our little private war with death somewhat in this light. If a man knows he will sooner or later be robbed upon a journey, he will have a bottle of the best in every inn, and look upon all his extravagances as so much gained upon the thieves. And above all, where instead of simply spending, he makes a profitable investment for some of his money, when it will be out of risk of loss. So every bit of brisk living, and above all when it is healthful, is just so much gained upon the wholesale filcher, death. We shall have the less in our pockets, the more in our stomach, when he


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Rh ing is o cryed up in this Age, deduced from the Ptolemaick Apects, are o conciouly doubtful, o obcurely delivered, and many of them o fallible, that it hath notoriouly proved the candal of Atrology, and poet the grave and ober breats of the world with a conceit, That Atrology is but a higher degree of Lieger de main, and Atrologers but liberal Juglers. Nay o pur-blinde it is (I mean the old Atrology) that in the very matter of the weather it elf, it is fain to confes it elf unable to do any more then give a probable conjecture of it; and not without good caue, ince it is oftentimes far enough from doing that too.

Shifts; in that, when it hath found the weather fall out different or contrary to the promies or threats of their Apects (which is no wonder, for many times there is above a Moneths difference between the apparent and true Apects; as for example, the Rh


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 cries stand and deliver. A swift stream is a favourite artifice of his, and one that brings him in a comfortable thing per annum; but when he and I come to settle our accounts, I shall whistle in his face for these hours upon the upper Oise.

Towards afternoon we got fairly drunken with the sunshine and the exhilaration of the pace. We could no longer contain ourselves and our content. The canoes were too small for us; we must be out and stretch ourselves on shore. And so in a green meadow we bestowed our limbs on the grass, and smoked deifying tobacco, and proclaimed the world excellent. It was the last good hour of the day, and I dwell upon it with extreme complacency.

On one side of the valley, high upon the chalky summit of the hill, a ploughman with his team appeared and disappeared at regular intervals. At each revelation he stood still for a few seconds against the sky: for all the world


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 (as the Cigarette declared) like a toy Burns who had just ploughed up the Mountain Daisy. He was the only living thing within view, unless we are to count the river.

On the other side of the valley a group of red roofs and a belfry showed among the foliage. Thence some inspired bell-ringer made the afternoon musical on a chime of bells. There was something very sweet and taking in the air he played; and we thought we had never heard bells speak so intelligibly, or sing so melodiously, as these. It must have been to some such measure that the spinners and the young maids sang, "Come away, Death," in the Shakespearian Illyria. There is so often a threatening note, something blatant and metallic, in the voice of bells, that I believe we have fully more pain than pleasure from hearing them; but these, as they sounded abroad, now high, now low, now with a plaintive cadence that caught the ear like the


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 burthen of a popular song, were always moderate and tunable, and seemed to fall in with the spirit of still, rustic places, like the noise of a waterfall or the babble of a rookery in spring. I could have asked the bell-ringer for his blessing, good, sedate old man, who swung the rope so gently to the time of his meditations. I could have blessed the priest or the heritors, or whoever may be concerned with such affairs in France, who had left these sweet old bells to gladden the afternoon, and not held meetings, and made collections, and had their names repeatedly printed in the local paper, to rig up a peal of brand-new, brazen, Birmingham-hearted substitutes, who should bombard their sides to the provocation of a brand-new bell-ringer, and fill the echoes of the valley with terror and riot.

At last the bells ceased, and with their note the sun withdrew. The piece was at an end;


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 shadow and silence possessed the valley of the Oise. We took to the paddle with glad hearts, like people who have sat out a noble performance, and return to work. The river was more dangerous here; it ran swifter, the eddies were more sudden and violent. All the way down we had had our fill of difficulties. Sometimes it was a weir which could be shot, sometimes one so shallow and full of stakes that we must withdraw the boats from the water and carry them round. But the chief sort of obstacle was a consequence of the late high winds. Every two or three hundred yards a tree had fallen across the river and usually involved more than another in its fall. Often there was free water at the end, and we could steer round the leafy promontory and hear the water sucking and bubbling among the twigs. Often, again, when the tree reached from bank to bank, there was room, by lying close, to shoot through underneath,


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 canoe and all. Sometimes it was necessary to get out upon the trunk itself and pull the boats across; and sometimes, where the stream was too impetuous for this, there was nothing for it but to land and "carry over." This made a fine series of accidents in the day's career, and kept us aware of ourselves.

Shortly after our reembarkation, while I was leading by a long way, and still full of a noble, exulting spirit in honour of the sun, the swift pace, and the church bells, the river made one of its leonine pounces round a corner, and I was aware of another fallen tree within a stone-cast. I had my backboard down in a trice, and aimed for a place where the trunk seemed high enough above the water, and the branches not too thick to let me slip below. When a man has just vowed eternal brotherhood with the universe, he is not in a temper to take great determinations coolly, and this, which might have been a very


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 important determination for me, had not been taken under a happy star. The tree caught me about the chest, and while I was yet struggling to make less of myself and get through, the river took the matter out of my hands, and bereaved me of my boat. The Arethusa swung round broadside on, leaned over, ejected so much of me as still remained on board, and thus disencumbered, whipped under the tree, righted, and went merrily away down stream.

I do not know how long it was before I scrambled on to the tree to which I was left clinging, but it was longer than I cared about. My thoughts were of a grave and almost sombre character, but I still clung to my paddle. The stream ran away with my heels as fast as I could pull up my shoulders, and I seemed, by the weight, to have all the water of the Oise in my trouser pockets. You can never know, till you try it, what a dead pull a river makes against a


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 man. Death himself had me by the heels, for this was his last ambuscado, and he must now join personally in the fray. And still I held to my paddle. At last I dragged myself on to my stomach on the trunk, and lay there a breathless sop, with a mingled sense of humour and injustice. A poor figure I must have presented to Burns upon the hill-top with his team. But there was the paddle in my hand. On my tomb, if ever I have one, I mean to get these words inscribed: "He clung to his paddle."

The Cigarette had gone past a while before; for, as I might have observed, if I had been a little less pleased with the universe at the moment, there was a clear way round the treetop at the farther side. He had offered his services to haul me out, but as I was then already on my elbows, I had declined, and sent him down stream after the truant Arethusa. The


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 stream was too rapid for a man to mount with one canoe, let alone two, upon his hands. So I crawled along the trunk to shore, and proceeded down the meadows by the river side. I was so cold that my heart was sore. I had now an idea of my own, why the reeds so bitterly shivered. I could have given any of them a lesson. The Cigarette remarked facetiously, that he thought I was "taking exercise" as I drew near, until he made out for certain that I was only twittering with cold. I had a rub down with a towel, and donned a dry suit from the india-rubber bag. But I was not my own man again for the rest of the voyage. I had a queasy sense that I wore my last dry clothes upon my body. The struggle had tired me; and perhaps, whether I knew it or not, I was a little dashed in spirit. The devouring element in the universe had leaped out against me, in this green valley quickened by a running stream. The bells were


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 all very pretty in their way, but I had heard some of the hollow notes of Pan's music. Would the wicked river drag me down by the heels, indeed? and look so beautiful all the time? Nature's good-humour was only skin-deep after all.

There was still a long way to go by the winding course of the stream, and darkness had fallen, and a late bell was ringing in Origny Sainte-Benoîte, when we arrived.


text: An Inland Voyage/Chapter 11

title: An Inland Voyage/Chapter 11


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Carnival notoriously cheated us at first. Finding us easy in our ways, he regretted having let us off so cheaply; and taking me aside, told me a cock-and-bull story with the moral of another five francs for the narrator. The thing was palpably absurd; but I paid up, and at once dropped all friendliness of manner, and kept him in his place as an inferior with freezing British dignity. He saw in a moment that he had gone too far, and killed a willing horse; his face fell; I am sure he would have refunded if he could only have thought of a decent pretext. He wished me to drink with him, but I would none of his drinks. He grew pathetically tender in his professions; but I walked beside him in


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next day was Sunday, and the church bells had little rest; indeed I do not think I remember anywhere else so great a choice of services as were here offered to the devout. And while the bells made merry in the sunshine, all the world with his dog was out shooting among the beets and colza.

In the morning a hawker and his wife went down the street at a foot-pace, singing to a very slow, lamentable music "O France, mes amours." It brought everybody to the door; and when our landlady called in the man to buy the words, he had not a copy of them left. She was not the first nor the second who had


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we came late for dinner, the company at table treated us to sparkling wine. "That is how we are in France," said one. "Those who sit down with us are our friends." And the rest applauded.

They were three altogether, and an odd trio to pass the Sunday with.

Two of them were guests like ourselves, both men of the north. One ruddy, and of a full habit of body, with copious black hair and beard, the intrepid hunter of France, who thought nothing so small, not even a lark or a minnow, but he might vindicate his prowess by its capture. For such a great, healthy man, his


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lingered in Moy a good part of the day, for we were fond of being philosophical, and scorned long journeys and early starts on principle. The place, moreover, invited to repose. People in elaborate shooting costumes sallied from the château with guns and game-bags; and this was a pleasure in itself, to remain behind while these elegant pleasure-seekers took the first of the morning. In this way, all the world may be an aristocrat, and play the duke among marquises, and the reigning monarch among dukes, if he will only outvie them in tranquillity. An imperturbable demeanour comes from perfect patience. Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune or


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 The ground began to shake under me, and I sunk suddenly down. The ghost of my mother hovered before my eyes, with a grim ghastly look; a chilly sweat bedewed my face and my senses forsook me."

"A violent shaking roused me at length from my stupefaction."

"The shaking did not cease, and I felt as if I was tossed to and fro; at the same time I heard a terrible, creeking and whizzing not far off. As soon as I had recovered my recollection, I perceived that I was sitting in a coach, driving onward with an incredible velocity, and found myself closely confined. Something was snoring by my side, but I could not distinguish what it was, being surrounded with impenetrable darkness."

"You cannot imagine what I suffered in that terrible situation: I was seized with anxiety and apprehension, creating the most


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 tormenting sensations, which cannot be described."

"The road my human or supernatural coachman had taken seemed to be very uneven, or, perhaps, he did not know the road, for I felt every moment the most violent jolts, which increased my anxiety still more, by the additional apprehension of being overturned. My bones, which already had been hurt very much by my falling down in the pleasure-house, seemed to be quite dislocated. I had been in that state of agony about half an hour, when a most violent jolt overturned the coach. A voice roared, "Jesu Maria!" Methought I felt the freezing hand of death upon my heart, and lost the power of recollection."

"At length I was roused from that state of insensibility, by the most excruciating pains. I opened my eyes; two men, each of them holding an horse by the bridle, were standing by me; a countryman, with a lanthorn,


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 was in their company, and the broken coach was lying on the ground at a small distance. They wanted to raise me up, but being pierced by terrible pains, I entreated them, for God's sake, not to touch me. My leg was fractured in two places: The horsemen promised to ride to a neighbouring town for assistance, and disappeared; the countryman remained with me and endeavoured to comfort me."

"I waited half an hour and nobody appeared; the night was cold: I waited an hour and no assistance came: One fainting fit followed the other, at length I heard the rolling of a coach, the countryman went with his lanthorn into the middle of the road, and saw a coach and four; the honest man begged the driver to stop, and related my misfortune. An old reverend man got out of the vehicle, lifted me, with the assistance of the good peasant, into the coach, and ordered the coachman to drive slowly onward."


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 call “arrest” – or an immediate appeal to the attention of the reader – don't attempt to do this at the outset: it's the most difficult part of the whole job. Instead dive straight into what you have to write – the part that interests you (as it will then inevitably interest the reader) – without preamble. Long afterwards, with all that you have written floating organised in your mind, and a complete picture thereby obtained, go back to the beginning and do your opening chapter: which, again, may well include a summary of what is to come after – a thing impossible until you've actually written the remainder of the book.

Don't be deterred – or let your style be cramped – by any subconscious self-limitation as to length. Nowadays the old 100,000 limit to which the

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book trade always tried to work as an all-round economical figure, no longer holds. Books of five times that length are common, and editors are beginning to see the wisdom of offering the buying public a good fat wad of stuff for their money. So, if an idea or a situation appeals to you, and you find yourself writing on and on about it, let it rip! Go on at it, irrespective of length. Remember the golden psychological rule that the reader's interest in a subject is his exact reflex of the writer’s: that and no more: certainly no less. Enthusiasms are, in fact “catching”.

But the moment you find you've written yourself dry at any point, shut up quickly, tuck in the ends, and put a full stop as big as a cricket bat.

In other words, don't be afraid of writing. Remember

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that you’ve stuff in you, experiences, contacts, enthusiasms and – to use a hardworked term – adventures, such as any other writer would envy: and you've not the least call to be in anyway diffident or apologetic about it.

In regard to maps. The stereotyped way, of putting a folding map in at the end, is usual, but maddening. It and the book cannot be held open at the same time, unless the reader sits up to a table and spreads it. A very usual plan is to substitute diagrams inside the front and back covers. These are far more accessible, since they are easily found and glanced at while reading. But in your case, I would recommend skeleton diagrams as above, reinforced by a whole bird’s eye view folding map just in front of the index, for the

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more earnest, or informed reader to consult about the details which your diagrams from their very nature would fail to supply.

Illustrations. They add enormously to the costs of production. Having regard to one's own submissions and memories, the tendency always is to put in too many of them, with the result that the price of the book rapidly mounts from half a guinea to 15 shillings and hence by an almost immediate step to a guinea: with consequent shortening of sales. One per 20 pages of print is a usual maximum ration. This is a great pity. Your stock of unusual photographs must be quite unique.


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 "With the dawn of morning we came to a village. My kind deliverer was the Lord of it. Having been carried to the castle, a surgeon was sent for, meanwhile the old nobleman endeavoured by his kind conversation, to make me forget part of my pains."

"The surgeon arrived a little while after, my wounds were dressed, and I was carried to bed. At first my deliverer would not leave me, and visited me afterwards three times a day. May heaven reward him for his generous and humane behaviour."

"As soon as I had related to him all that had happened to me, he sent some of his people to look after the coach; but it could be found no where."

"After nine weeks confinement I was recovered so far that I could return to F, the benevolent nobleman accompanied me thither, and my landlord was rejoiced to see me. Inquiring after the mysterious stranger


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 I was told, that he had been seen no more since I had left the inn. My deliverer staid three days with me, and then we parted in a most affectionate manner. The next day I sat out for my own country, where I happily arrived without any farther accident."

"Here Hellfried concluded his wonderful tale, which he, as he added, never had been able to unfold, though he had taken the greatest pains to come at the bottom of it. He looked at his friend, eager to hear what he would say to those extraordinary adventures; but Herrman was lost in profound meditation for many minutes, at length he began: "Brother, thy tale is very wonderful, so wonderful, that I should not have believed it, if I had not met, on my travels, with adventures, which seem to have some connexion with thine."

"Hellfried had apprehended that Herrman would laugh at his story, as many of his friends had done; he was therefore very


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Letter 8, 19th May 1931 Don't forget a good index. Consider the book reviews in the R.G.S. Journal. Every one of them finishes with comment on maps and index,

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their presence or absence and their quality. Indexing is sheer coolie-work: but it's worth it. Some agencies advertise themselves as “doing indexing” – knowing what a toil it is to the author: their work may save you a job, but it's quite valueless when finished: have nothing to do with them.

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I'm afraid it's dreadful cheek of me to have offered my suggestions. You probably know quite as much about it as I do – if not more. But if you don't, the above may shorten work for you by eliminating some of the more important snags.

With regard to the finished result, you can promise yourself a large and interested audience – not least enthusiastic being the one who is writing to you.

 * Yours sincerely

 * L. A. Bethell

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Letter 8, 19th May 1931

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New Clan

Dorking

19 . V. 31

Dear BaIley,

Many thanks for yours of April 27 th. I am sorry Kulu won't see you. You are likely to get little holiday if you go to Mashobra and are within shout of the F.O. In any case you will find it difficult to avoid week-enders coming out for a breath of air, and bringing all the latest guf with th em. I wish I could have a talk with you: not so much on facts and events (we get them, fairly accurately, by cable) as on tendencies and policies. Irwin has had a proper whitewashing since his return: and all comments about his “sanity” on a note of uplift – and general

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soulfulness. Very much as they tried to idolise that insanitary little bunniah, Gandhi. They forget – I sometimes think the whole of this damned emasculated milk and water post war world forgets – that in dealing with Bolsheviks, Chicago gangsters, bunniah activism plotters, and all the rest of the moral underworld, you have to set a thief to catch a thief; and not be too squeamish. “Uplift” died with the Victorians. That's why I hold that a quick and easy solution of the present Indian troubles would be quickly found if we had Winston Churchill at the India Office, and Lloyd (late of