They had another child, and another, and another and another. A man and a woman who can do nothing else can always have children, and, if they are legally married and are able to support their progeny, there seems no end to the amount of begetting they may do and the laurel crowns of virtue to which they are thereby entitled. Isabel put her vitality into child-bearing, boosting George Augustus to profitable action, thrusting herself ever onward and upward financially and socially, buying and furnishing houses, quarrelling with her friends, acquiring sheiks, malforming her children’s minds, capriciously interfering with their education, swanking to the Hartlys with her money, patronizing the now aged and less venomous dear Mamma, and other lofty and inspiring activities. Was she happy? What a question! We are not placed here by a benevolent Providence to be happy, but to make ourselves unpleasant to our neighbours and to impose the least amiable portions of our personalities on as many people as possible. Was George Augustus happy? Which I parry with—did he deserve to be happy? He made money anyway, which is more than you and I can do. He dropped claret for whiskey, and the æsthetes for the “English Classics,” all those “noble” authors who have “stood the test of time,” and thereby become so very dull that one prefers to go to the cinema which has not stood any such test. He had a brougham, in which he drove daily to his office. He became a Worshipful Grand Master, and possessed any amount of funny little medals and coloured leather _cache-sexe_, which are apparently worn in the Mysteries of the Free Masons. He framed his certificates as a Solicitor, a Buffalo, a Druid, and all the other queer things, and hung them in various places to surprise and awe the inexperienced. He had a great many bills. For about ten years he was so prosperous that he was able to give up attending Church on Sundays. [ IV ] George, the younger, liked Hamborough best perhaps, Martin’s Point next, Pamber hardly at all, and he detested Dullborough, the town which contained his father’s offices and the minor public school which he attended. The mind of a very young child is not very interesting. It has imagination and wonder, but too unregulated, too bizarre, too “quaint,” too credulous. Does it matter very much that George babbled o’ white lobsters, stirred up frogs in a bucket, thought that the word “mist” meant sunset, and was easily persuaded that a sort of milk pudding he detested had been made from an ostrich’s egg? Of course a good deal of adult imagination consists in peoples’ persuading themselves that they can see white lobsters, just as their poetry consists in persuading themselves that the milk pudding _did_ come out of the ostrich’s egg. The child at least is honest, which is something. But on the whole the young child-mind is boring. * * * * *