“_Pink ’un?_” said the very fair young gentleman almost breathlessly. “_Black and White._ What’s all these others? _Athenæum?_ _Sporting and Dramatic?_ Right O. And—Eh! What? Do I _look_ the sort that buys a _Spectator_? You don’t know! My dear boy, where’s your _savoir faire_?” § 2 The Lord Chancellor was a philosopher and not easily perturbed. His severe manner was consciously assumed and never much more than skin-deep. He had already furled his eyebrows and dismissed his vis-a-vis from his mind before the train started. He turned over the _Hibbert Journal_, and read in it with a large tolerance. Dimly on the outskirts of his consciousness the very fair young man hovered, as a trifling annoyance, as something pink and hot rustling a sheet of a discordant shade of pink, as something that got in the way of his legs and whistled softly some trivial cheerful air, just to show how little it cared. Presently, very soon, this vague trouble would pass out of his consciousness altogether.... The Lord Chancellor was no mere amateur of philosophy. His activities in that direction were a part of his public reputation. He lectured on religion and æsthetics. He was a fluent Hegelian. He spent his holidays, it was understood, in the Absolute—at any rate in Germany. He would sometimes break into philosophy at dinner tables and particularly over the desert and be more luminously incomprehensible while still apparently sober, than almost anyone. An article in the Hibbert caught and held his attention. It attempted to define a new and doubtful variety of Infinity. You know, of course, that there are many sorts and species of Infinity, and that the Absolute is just the king among Infinities as the lion is king among the Beasts.... “I say,” said a voice coming out of the world of Relativity and coughing the cough of those who break a silence, “you aren’t going to Shonts, are you?” The Lord Chancellor returned slowly to earth. “Just seen your label,” said the very fair young man. “You see,—_I’m_ going to Shonts.” The Lord Chancellor remained outwardly serene. He reflected for a moment. And then he fell into that snare which is more fatal to great lawyers and judges perhaps than to any other class of men, the snare of the crushing repartee. One had come into his head now,—a beauty. “Then we shall meet there,” he said in his suavest manner. “Well—rather.” “It would be a great pity,” said the Lord Chancellor with an effective blandness, using a kind of wry smile that he employed to make things humorous, “it would be a great pity, don’t you think, to anticipate that pleasure.” And having smiled the retort well home with his head a little on one side, he resumed with large leisurely movements the reading of his _Hibbert Journal_. “Got me there,” said the very fair young man belatedly, looking boiled to a turn, and after a period of restlessness settled down to an impatient perusal of _Black and White_.