He thrusts me weakly back with his long, white hand. "My God!" he says almost forcibly, "what nonsense all this is! All these dreams! All Utopias! There she is----! Oh, but I have dreamt of her! And now----" A sob catches him. I am really frightened by this time. I still try to keep between him and these Utopians, and to hide his gestures from them. "It's different here," I persist. "It's different here. The emotion you feel has no place in it. It's a scar from the earth--the sore scar of your past----" "And what are we all but scars? What is life but a scarring? It's _you_--you who don't understand! Of course we are covered with scars, we live to be scarred, we are scars! We are the scars of the past! These _dreams_, these childish dreams----!" He does not need to finish his sentence, he waves an unteachable destructive arm. My Utopia rocks about me. For a moment the vision of that great courtyard hangs real. There the Utopians live real about me, going to and fro, and the great archway blazes with sunlight from the green gardens by the riverside. The man who is one of the samurai, and his lady, whom the botanist loved on earth, pass out of sight behind the marble flower-set Triton that spouts coolness in the middle of the place. For a moment I see two working men in green tunics sitting on a marble seat in the shadow of the colonnade, and a sweet little silver-haired old lady, clad all in violet, and carrying a book, comes towards us, and lifts a curious eye at the botanist's gestures. And then---- "Scars of the past! Scars of the past! These fanciful, useless dreams!" Section 2 There is no jerk, no sound, no hint of material shock. We are in London, and clothed in the fashion of the town. The sullen roar of London fills our ears.... I see that I am standing beside an iron seat of poor design in that grey and gawky waste of asphalte--Trafalgar Square, and the botanist, with perplexity in his face, stares from me to a poor, shrivelled, dirt-lined old woman--my God! what a neglected thing she is!--who proffers a box of matches.... He buys almost mechanically, and turns back to me. "I was saying," he says, "the past rules us absolutely. These dreams----" His sentence does not complete itself. He looks nervous and irritated. "You have a trick at times," he says instead, "of making your suggestions so vivid----" He takes a plunge. "If you don't mind," he says in a sort of quavering ultimatum, "we won't discuss that aspect of the question--the lady, I mean--further." He pauses, and there still hangs a faint perplexity between us. "But----" I begin. For a moment we stand there, and my dream of Utopia runs off me like water from an oiled slab. Of course--we lunched at our club. We came back from Switzerland by no dream train but by the ordinary Bale express. We have been talking of that Lucerne woman he harps upon, and I have made some novel comment on his story. I have touched certain possibilities.