“What a coward!” he thinks, with the moral self-flagellation of an over-sensitive and over-sincere person. “Why could I not tell them the truth? Why did I limit myself to saying that she was a perfectly respectable young woman? If I cannot face the simple enunciation of the intention, how shall I ever bring myself to the endurance of publishing the fact when it is accomplished? Am I, after all, the slave of opinion, like anybody else? Am I afraid of a set of fools who are capering on their primrose path, seeing nothing of the abyss to which it leads? If I have not the courage of my views and faiths, wherein am I superior to their philistinism? I do what I choose; what I see to be wise and right and just; I desire to give an example which shall show how utterly I despise the fictitious barriers of caste and custom, and yet I have not courage enough to say to a few people who are drinking tea in my rooms, ‘My good folks, I am going to marry a young woman called Annie Brown.’ Why could I not say it? Why was I such a miserable poltroon?” He throws himself into a deep chair and lights a cigarette. “What would my aunt have done? What would that grinning cad Marlow have said? What would Cicely Seymour have thought? Perhaps she would have approved. She has more sympathy, more insight than the others--and what a charming profile! And those deep blue eyes under those long thick lashes; they are eyes which have mind in them as well as youth and smiles and innocence; they are eyes which will be still beautiful when she is seventy and her hair is white under a lace mob-cap or a black satin hood. What colour are Annie’s eyes? They are round and small, of no particular colour, I think; a reddish grey. Dear good little girl, it was not for her beauty that I selected her.” Critchett opens the door at that moment, and breaks in on his reflections. “Mr. Fanshawe, sir.” A gentleman of no definite age, with a shrewd countenance and a significant smile, crosses the room with outstretched hand. “My dear Wilfrid, they tell me you are in a wax about the exceptions I took to your article. I am extremely sorry to touch any single line of yours, but B.P. must be considered, you know. You are miles too advanced for this inviolate isle; she is still shuddering at the fright which Guy Fawkes gave her.” Bertram replies stiffly: “I have certainly no affinity to Guy Fawkes, who was a religious person and a strict monarchist. As for the essay, pray do not trouble yourself; I shall publish it in the _Age to Come_.” “Oh, that’s a pity; that will be practically putting it into the waste-paper basket; excuse me saying so, but you know the circulation of the _Age to Come_ is at present--is--well--limited.” “We certainly do not chronicle scandals of the hunting-field, and devote columns to prophesying the shape of next year’s bonnets, as the _Torch_ does!”