“My dear Jimmy,” said Julian, adroitly avoiding the arm of an exuberant lady impersonating Winter, and making fair practice with her detachable icicles, “it was Kit or no one. Just consider Malim’s position, which was that of thousands of other men of his type. They are the cleverest men of their schools; they are the intellectual stars of their Varsities. I was at Oxford with Malim. He was a sort of tin god. Double-first and all that. Just like all the rest of them. They get what is looked upon as a splendid appointment under Government. They come to London, hire comfortable chambers or a flat, go off to their office in the morning, leave it in the evening, and are given a salary which increases by regular gradations from an initial two hundred a year. Say that a man begins this kind of work at twenty-four. What are his matrimonial prospects? His office work occupies his entire attention (the idea that Government clerks don’t work is a fiction preserved merely for the writers of burlesque) from the moment he wakes in the morning until dinner. His leisure extends, roughly speaking, from eight-thirty until twelve. The man whom I am discussing, and of whom Malim is a type, is, as I have already proved, intellectual. He has, therefore, ambitions. The more intellectual he is the more he loathes the stupid routine of his daily task. Thus his leisure is his most valuable possession. There are books he wants to read—those which he liked in the days previous to his slavery—and new ones which he sees published every day. There are plays he wants to see performed. And there are subjects on which he would like to write—would give his left hand to write, if the loss of that limb wouldn’t disqualify him for his post. Where is his social chance? It surely exists only in the utter abandonment of his personal projects. And to go out when one is tied to the clock is a poor sort of game. But suppose he _does_ seek the society of what friends he can muster in London. Is he made much of, fussed over? Not a bit of it. Brainless subalterns, ridiculous midshipmen, have, in the eyes of the girl whom he has come to see, a reputation that he can never win. They’re in the Service; they’re so dashing; they’re so charmingly extravagant; they’re so tremendous in face of an emergency that their conversational limitations of “Yes” and “No” are hailed as brilliant flights of genius. Their inane anecdotes, their pointless observations are positively courted. It is they who retire to the conservatory with the divine Violet, whose face is like the Venus of Milo’s, whose hair (one hears) reaches to her knees, whose eyes are like blue saucers, and whose complexion is a pink poem. It is Jane, the stumpy, the flat-footed—Jane, who wears glasses and has all the virtues which are supposed to go with indigestion: big hands and an enormous waist—Jane, I repeat, who is told off to talk to a man like Malim. If, on the other hand, he and his fellows refuse to put on