And late that night I watched in the Tube, after the theatres, a man and a small eager-faced boy talking about something they had been to see. Although sitting exactly opposite them, I have no idea what they said, but they amused each other immensely as they recalled this joke and that. Nothing extraordinary in this, you will say. But there was. The reason why I was so profoundly interested to be a witness of the scene was that they were deaf and dumb, and the whole conversation was carried on by signs; not by the alphabet that one learnt at school in order to communicate during class, but a rapid synthetic improvement upon it, where two or three lightning-quick movements--gesture grammalogues--sufficed to convey whole sentences of meaning. It is perhaps curious, but I had never before been brought into such close contact with the deaf and dumb; I have never even been--as, since I profess to explore and study London, I should have been--to that church in Oxford Street, opposite the great secret emporium, where the deaf and dumb worship and by signs are exhorted to be good. Beyond watching that boys' school which one sees gesticulating on the Brighton front, I had never until this night seen these afflicted creatures in intimate and sparkling talk. I found the sight not only interesting, but as cheering as those poor old things in the King's Road oasis had been saddening. Because the unfortunates were making such a splendid fight for it. No boy with every faculty about him could have been gayer or merrier than this mute with the dancing eyes; nor can I conceive of a spoken conversation that contained a completer interchange of ideas in the same space of time. At Oxford Circus they got out, and left me pondering on deafness and dumbness. To be dumb, of course, is, comparatively speaking, nothing; for most of the perplexities of life come from talk. But to be deaf--to live ever in silence, to see laughing lips moving, to see hands wandering over the keys, to see birds exulting, and be denied the resultant harmonies: that must be terrible. Yet terrible only to those who have known what the solace and gaiety of words and the beauty of sound can be. To have been born deaf is different, and I have no doubt whatever that the deaf and dumb have delectable lands of their own into which we can never stray, where wonderful flowers of silence grow. It is even possible, since all the visible world is theirs, that they never envy us at all. A Lesson God--it is notorious--works in a mysterious way to get morality and decency into us; which is another way of saying that not all light is communicated by the Episcopal bench, by clerks in holy orders, by divines who do not conform, or by editors at Whitefield's Tabernacle. The other day, for example, I had lunch with a very charming actress in a pleasant restaurant. "Rather a funny thing happened the last time I was here," she remarked. "Yes?" I replied languidly. "About you."