Just at the moment when he was sore and smarting with a sense of humiliation and futility; when in his newly-aroused angry discontent all intercourse with women of his own class had become a farce and an inanity to him; accident had thrown it into his power to create for himself, as it were, a world in which all that had suddenly revealed itself as lacking in his actual life should be lavished upon him. For his acquaintance of Piccadilly he had absolutely no surroundings, except such as he chose to give himself. The Julian Romayne of society, the nonentity, the “figure-head,” as he had muttered angrily to himself, had no existence for her. It was Julian’s own private Julian, a personality developed side by side with the sudden and violent re-adjustment of his conception of his relations with the world, who was looked up to, listened to, respected, and deferred to during the hour’s walk which lay between that side-street out of Piccadilly and a certain little street out of the Hammersmith Road. A vague, undefined craving for pre-eminence and admiration had risen in him with his realisation of his dependence, and the reflected nature of the light with which he shone in society. To a weak nature in which that craving has once stirred it matters little by what means it is met, so that it is to some extent satisfied. The walk of to-night was a repetition of the walks that had preceded it; the talk a little more intimate and a little more personal in tone than any of its predecessors, as that of each of the latter in its turn had been. In the course of the day something had occurred to remind Clemence of her father and her father’s old home, and in intervals of Julian’s talk about himself, she told him a good deal about her thoughts of that little country place; of how there had been Brymers here for generations and generations. “You must have been Puritans once,” said Julian, laughing, as he often laughed, at some little grave turn of her speech as he looked into the sweet, serious face. Work-girl as she was, she seemed to have acquired neither the talk nor the voice of her kind. The simple form of her words, her accent, and her gentle voice, seemed to belong to a past, quiet and full of a modest dignity of which the London of the nineteenth century hardly knows. “You would have made an awfully jolly little Puritan, Clemence!” “I don’t know,” she said simply; “I was so little when father died. But he felt it dreadfully, I’ve heard, when he came to London; it nearly broke his heart.” “Why did he do it, then?” said Julian lightly. “He thought he ought,” returned the girl. “You see, there was nothing to do at Feldbourne--nothing but ploughing, and country things, you know. And father thought a man ought to do something--that everything was meant to go on and get better, you know--and that every man ought to help, ought to work. So, of course, he was obliged to come, you see.”