What had she thought of him? What did she think of him? Nothing perhaps. She had belonged to the “old guard.” Many men had passed through her hands. He felt at that moment acute hostility to women. They were treacherous, unreliable, even the best of them. They had not the continuity which belonged to men. Even elderly women--he was thinking of women of the world--even they were not to be trusted. Life was warfare even when war was over. One had to fight always against the instability of those around you. And yet there was planted in a man--at any rate there was planted in him--a deep longing for stability, a need to trust, a desire to attach himself to someone with whom he could be quite unreserved, to whom he could “open out” without fear of criticism or of misunderstanding. He had believed that in Lady Sellingworth he had found such an one, and now he had been shown his mistake. He reached the house in which he lived, but although he had walked to it with the intention of going in he paused on the threshold, then turned away and went on towards Hyde Park. Night was falling; the damp softness of late autumn companioned him wistfully. The streets were not very full. London seemed unusually quiet that evening. But when he reached the Marble Arch he saw people streaming hither and thither, hurrying towards Oxford Street, pouring into the Edgware Road, climbing upon omnibuses which were bound for Notting Hill, Ealing and Acton, drifting towards the wide and gloomy spaces of the Park. He crossed the great roadway and went into the Park, too. Attracted by a small gathering of dark figures he joined them, and standing among nondescript loungers he listened for a few minutes to a narrow-chested man with a long, haggard face, a wispy beard and protruding, decayed teeth, who was addressing those about him on the mysteries of life. He spoke of the struggle for bread, of materialism, of the illusions of sensuality, of the Universal Intelligence, of the blind cruelty of existence. “You are all unhappy!” he exclaimed, in a thin but carrying voice, which sounded genteel and fanatical. “You rush here and there not knowing why or wherefore. Many of you have come into this very Park to-night without any object, driven by the wish for something to take you out of your miseries. Can you deny it, I say?” A tall soldier who was standing near Craven looked down at the plump girl beside him and said: “How’s that, Lil? We’re both jolly miserable, ain’t we?” “Go along with yer! Not me!” was the response, with an impudent look. “Then let’s get on where it’s quieter. What ho!” They moved demurely away. “Can you deny,” the narrow-chested man continued, sawing the air with a thin, dirty hand, “that you are all dissatisfied with life, that you wonder about it, as Plato wondered, as Tolstoi wondered, as the Dean of St. Paul’s wonders, as I am wondering now? From this very Park you look up at the stars, when there are any, and you ask yourselves--”