One of the virtues of men is that they are not intended for fancy portrayal. Why should one ever describe the outward surface of a man, unless he is the hero of one’s book, or unless one is engaged to marry him? The particular Adam in this compartment comes under neither of these headings. He is copiously reproduced all over the world, but clusters thickest in Piccadilly. Possibly you see him at his best very far away from Piccadilly. There is something that transfigures the commonplace in the fact of having kissed the very hem of the Empire’s wide-flung robe. “I say, Miss Brown, how’s Albert?” asked the young man. For the other occupants of the little world seemed mutually familiar. It occurred to the suffragette that Fate always threw her with people who knew each other and did not know her. Miss Brown, the Eve in blue serge, bridled. To all women so flawlessly brought up as Miss Brown, there exists a sort of electricity in the voice of man which sends a tremor across their manners, so to speak. “Albert, Mr. Wise, is still very weakly. I sometimes wonder whether I shall rear him. His mental activities, I am told, have outgrown his physical strength.” The young man fanned himself. And indeed mental activities sounded unsuited to the climate. The sun spilt square flames upon the floor through the window. The silhouette of the passing landscape scorched itself across the sky-line. Tattered bananas looked like crowds of creatures struck mad by a merciless sun. The voice of the lady novelist seemed to reach the suffragette through a veil. “That child will make his mark. He has the most marvellous mental grasp....” Two hills to the northwest moved apart in the middle distance, like the curtains from a stage. And there was Union Town lying white beside her sea, white, but veiled by her green gardens. Port King George, on an attenuated isthmus, stretched its parallel form along to shield the mother coast from the Atlantic. Even from here you could see the white gleam of the ocean’s teeth, as they gnashed upon the reef. A spike of calm steel water lay between Union Town and her defending reef. The suffragette thought: “A skeleton in the grass with a sword beside it....” She also looked at the toy figure of the _Caribbeania_, so close to land as to be disguised as part of the island. Her two funnels mingled with the factory chimneys by the wharf. “But he is sure to have landed by now,” thought the suffragette. She felt unsentimentally interested in the fact. It was too hot to feel more. “I happened to mention the Book of Genesis,” said the lady novelist. “And Albert produced a most ingenious theory about the scientific explanation of the fable of creation. I wish I had such a nephew. What a marvellous link with the coming generation!” “On the other hand,” said Mr. Wise, “I happened to mention _Alice in Wonderland_, and he said it was out of date, and, as a dream, most improbable.”