Seated in a wine-room or lager-beer hall, meditatively sipping from glass or tankard, and savouring a fragrant cigar, he contrived to extract a certain pleasure from the contemplation of his equality with the men around him. Many of them, he guessed with satisfaction, were in a worse or a less secure position than his own. He studied faces and made a practice of entering into conversation with strangers, and these chance encounters almost invariably left him with the impression that he had met a mental inferior. Steeping himself, as it were, in all the frivolous, lusory activities of the West End, he began to acquire that indefinable, unmistakable air of _savoir-faire_ characteristic of the prosperous clerk who spends his leisure in public places. People from the country frequently mistook him for the young man-about-town of the society papers, familiar with every form of metropolitan chicane, luxury, and vice. * * * * * After breakfast he went out into the Park with his skates. The Serpentine had been frozen hard for more than a week, and yesterday, a solitary unit in tens of thousands, he had celebrated Christmas on the ice, skating from noon till nearly midnight, with brief intervals for meals. The exercise and the fresh air had invigorated and enlivened him, and this morning, as he plunged once more into the loose throng of skaters, his spirits were buoyant. It had been his intention to pass yet another day on the Serpentine; but a sudden, surprising fancy entered his head, flitted away, and returned again and again with such an increasing allurement that he fell in love with it: Why not commence to write now? Why, after all, leave the new beginning till the New Year? Was it true--what he had mournfully taken for granted for a month past, and so lately as an hour ago--that he lacked the moral strength to carry a good resolution into effect at any time he chose?... In a moment, he had sworn to work four hours before he slept that night. The decision reached, his humour became unequivocally gay. He shot forward with longer, bolder strokes, enjoying with a keener zest the swift motion and the strange black-and-white, sylvan-urban scene about him. He forgot the year of idleness which lay immediately behind him, forgot every previous failure, in the passionate exultation of his new resolve. He whistled. He sang. He attempted impossible figures, and only laughed when they ended in a fall. A woman, skating alone, stumbled to her knees; he glided towards her, lifted her lightly, raised his hat, and was gone before she could thank him: it was neatly done; he felt proud of himself. As the clock struck twelve he took off his skates, and walked in a quiet corner of the Park, deliberating intently upon the plot of a story, which fortunately had been in his mind for several months.