George is not communicative. He flicks ash from his cigarette and picks up a month-old _Reynolds's_. And that is a sufficient answer to my accusations, though he does not realize it. I, at any rate, have not the face to upbraid a lonely youth, without home or girl friends from one year's end to another, when in that same _Reynolds's_ I see page after page of "cases." If these people swerve, if they break the tables of the law every week, surely George the Fourth may hold up his head. You see, in Geordie-land, in the ports of Tyne and Wear, where George the Fourth was bred, there are many engineers who have been out in steamers working up and down the China coast, who have had nice little homes in Hankow, Hong-Kong, or Shanghai, with Japanese wives all complete. Then when the charter was up, and the steamer came home, these practical men left homes and wives behind them, and all was just as before. That is George's dream. "China or Burma coast-trade. That's the job for me when I get ma tickut." It is useless for a stern moralist like me to argue, because I feel certain that, being what he is, he would be entirely wise and right. What an utter futility is marriage to a sea-going engineer! Here is my friend McGorren, a hard-working and Christian man. He is chief of a boat in the Burmese oil trade. His wife is dead; he has three children, who are being brought up with their cousins in North London. McGorren has been out East two years. It will be another two years before he can come home. Where is the morality of this? He has no home. His little ones grow up strangers to him; they are mothered by a stranger. He is voteless, yet subject to income tax. He can have no friendships, no society, no rational enjoyment save reading. Nothing! And what is his return? Four hundred a year and all found. I look into the frank eyes of George the Fourth and I am mute. In no philosophy, in no "Conduct of Life," in no "Lesson for the Day" which I have read can I discover any consolation or sane rule of living for such as he. Is not this a terrible gap in Ruskin, Emerson, and Co.? I take up the first and I ask George to listen. He is perfectly willing, because, he says with reverence, I am "a scholar," and I have read to him before.