"We shall," she said; "though, as a matter of fact, I haven't seen much of Douglas the last three or four years." "How is that?" "Oh, he was at Eton, and only home during the holidays. I was always away at those times; and, of course, he's been training for the last year." "He is joining the Horse Guards?" "Yes. The eldest son always goes into the army until he succeeds to the title." "And the second son?" "The navy." A smile lurked in the corners of his mouth. "Supposing the second son proved a bad sailor, what then?" She shrugged her shoulders. "I suppose he would stay on shore, and probably go to the devil." He stooped to pick a blade of grass, and munched it meditatively. "And what happens to the girls?" he asked, after a pause. Her lips, which were like pomegranates, straightened into a line. "The girls are not of great account," she said, a note of suppressed tension in her voice, which he quite failed to note. "We are educated in a sort of a way, introduced to the arts, but not allowed to pursue the acquaintanceship; then we marry--if at all--some one of our set and everybody says, 'Didn't she do well to get him?'" "And then?" Again she made a pretty shrug with her shoulders. "Then we move into our new homes, which are much the same as the old ones, and we bring up a family of descendants for our husbands. When the husband dies, the eldest male child takes over the estate, and his wife rules in the mother's place." "And she leaves, in her declining years, the home which, naturally, she has grown to love?" "Yes. Why not?" For several moments neither spoke. Always hasty in its judgments, his brain was fired with a rankling sense of injustice. He thought he saw the explanation of the bloodless good-by to the viscount. The mental inertia of the sons and the emotional placidity of the girl were natural consequences of a hereditary system which dulled personalities and drove initiative into the scrap-heap of tradition. It was monstrous that one's future and entity should be planned like the life of a hot-house plant; it was no longer a puzzle to him that England's real leaders and thinkers sprang from obscurity. He thanked "whatever gods there be" that he was born in a country which had only one tradition--that it once rebelled against the past. He turned towards the girl and gazed argumentatively into her very deep and very blue eyes; then he gasped, and a far-away look crept into his own dark, restless ones. "_Galatea_," he said, "_is coming to life_." Subconsciously she had caught his spirit of resentment, and, being a woman, she thrilled to the sense of rebellion in his nature. With the unlocking of her emotions had come the sparkle in the blue depths of her eyes, and the animation which had lit at once the dormant radiancy of her beauty--and his sudden admiration. In addition--though none was needed--the mellowing sun lingered on her hair till it seemed like strands of gold.