And Old Mole thought of that other Harbottler who had so loved the public that he had trampled his wife in the mud to retain its esteem. Matilda returned: "Who's coming to the theater with me?" she said, and her eyes lighted on Panoukian and she gave him a smile more profound, more subtle, more tenderly humorous than any she had ever bestowed on Old Mole. Both men rose. Old Mole reached the door first. With graceful generosity Panoukian bowed, yielded his claim, kissed Matilda's hand, and took them to the door. Old Mole went first. Halfway down the stairs Matilda turned: "Oh! Arthur," she said, "the puppy's a perfect darling." As coarse men take to drink, or philandering, or tobacco, to relieve the strain of existence, so Old Mole took to work. His "Out of Bounds" (Liebermann, pp. 453, 7_s._ 6_d._ net) is a long book, but it was written, revised, corrected in proof and published within six months. It was boomed, and lay, unread, on every one's drawing-room table. He received letters about it from many interesting personages, and from his sickbed Robert Wherry gave it his pontifical blessing. The Secretary of State for Education asked Old Mole to dinner, and declared sympathy with the criticism of the prevailing system, but shook his head dubiously over the probability of his department taking any intelligent interest in it. "I quite agree," he said, "that you ought to get at children through their imaginations, but imagination isn't exactly a conspicuous quality of government departments." "Then I don't see how you can govern," said Old Mole. "We don't," said the Secretary of State. "We take orders, like everybody else, but we are in a position to pretend that we are giving them. A government department is a great wheel going round very, very slowly, shedding regulations upon the place beneath. Every now and then, when none of the permanent officials is looking, an intelligent man can slip a real provision into the feeder and trust to luck for its finding the right need and the right place. . . . But it is not often we have the advantage of such thoroughly informed criticism, Mr. Beenham. The country is lamentably little interested in education, considering how much it has suffered from it." "I have suffered from it." He was amused by his celebrity. Every little group had a cast for him, but none of their bait attracted him in the least. He preferred to swim in his own waters, leisurely, painfully in the wake of Panoukian and Matilda. They at least knew where they were going, were possessed by an immediate object. Where all the politicians and scribes were looking away from their own lives toward a reorganized society based on a change in humanity, a change not in degree but in kind, Panoukian and Matilda were changing, growing, responding to natural necessity. They were loving, loving themselves, loving life, their bodies, their minds, everything that body and mind could apprehend.