"Not very much, I confess. I quite approve of it. It's just the kind of thing for people like Miss Bride, plodding and practical; no doubt they'll make it very useful. But I have rather lost my keenness for work of that sort. Perhaps I have grown out of it. Of course I wish as much as ever for the good of the lower classes, but I feel that my own work will lie in another direction." "Tell me what you have in mind," said Dymchurch, meeting her look with soft eyes. "What I really care about now is the spirit of the educated class. There's such a great deal to be done among people of our own kind. Not of course by direct teaching and preaching, but by personal influence, exercised in all sorts of ways. I should like to set the intellectual tone in my own circle. I should like my house to--as it were, to radiate light." The listener could not but smile. Yet his amusement had no tincture of irony. He himself would not have used these phrases, but was not the thought exactly what he had in mind? He, too, felt his inaptitude for the ordinary forms of "social" usefulness; in his desire and his resolve to "do something," he had been imagining just this sort of endeavour, and May's words seemed to make it less vague. "I quite understand you," he exclaimed, with some fervour. "There's plenty of scope for that sort of influence. You would do your best to oppose the tendencies of vulgar and selfish society. If only in a little circle one could set the fashion of thought, of living for things that are worth while! And I see no impossibility. It has been done before now." "I'm very glad you like the idea," said May, graciously. Again--without looking at him--she saw his lips shaping words which they could not sound; she saw his troubled, abashed smile, and his uneasy movement which ended in nothing at all. "We have some fine trees at Rivenoak," fell from her, as her eyes wandered. "Indeed you have!" "You like trees, don't you?" "Very much. When I was a boy, I once saw a great many splendid oaks and beeches cut down, and it made me miserable." "Where was that?" "On land that had belonged to my father, and, which, for a year or two, belonged to me." He spoke with an uneasy smile, again crushing a brown leaf between his fingers. May's silence compelled him to proceed. "I have no trees now." He tried to laugh. "Only a bit of a farm, which seems to be going out of cultivation." "But why do you let it do so?" "It's in the hands of a troublesome tenant. If I had been wise, I should have learnt to farm it myself, years ago. Perhaps I shall still do so." "That would be interesting," said May. "Tell me about it, will you? It's in Kent, I think?"