He chuckled; then sitting back in his chair, his little eyes on the ceiling, he said almost to himself--"Once, years ago, when I was very, very young and romantic--almost--just for a year or two I loved your Shelley. He was everything--I could quote him by the page.... He's gone from me now, or most of him has, but there was one line that seemed to me then the most romantic thing I had ever read and has remained with me always. It went--'And we'll have fires out of the Grand Duke's wood'--It's in the letter to Maria Gisborne, I think--I've quite forgotten what the context is now--it's all pretty trivial and unimportant, but those were the days when I made pictures--I saw it! Lord, Christopher, how it comes back! The wood, very thick, very large, very black, no sun--very still, and the great house behind it, huge and white, with long gardens and green lawns and peacocks, and the Grand Duke, with his powdered wig, and diamond-buckled shoes, his gorgeous suit, his jewelled sword, his snuff and his wine, his silly little dried-up yellow face. "Then the rabble--dirty, smelling, ill-conditioned fellows--breaking through the silence, tearing up the Wood, knocking down the palace, hanging the Grand Duke from a tree, last of all, setting the whole thing into the most splendid blaze!... Oh! of course that wasn't Shelley's context--_his_ was all about boiling a kettle or something--but that's the way I saw it--just like that." Nothing stirred Brun like the sound of his own voice and now he was getting very excited indeed and was waving his hands. "Yes," said Christopher placidly. "Very dramatic. What does it all mean?" "Well, this. It seems to me that that's just what's been happening over here. Your Duchess is dead and instead there is to-night's crowd. The Grand Duke is gone and all that was his--now for the fires!" Christopher, filling his pipe, paused, and then, his voice grave and serious: "Romantics aside, Brun, for a minute. Do you remember your Tiger idea you delivered to me once? I've often thought of it since. You said then that the reason why the Duchess and her times--the Grand Duke and his wood--had got to go was because their policy had been to give the Tigers of the world no liberty--to pretend indeed that they weren't there, and that now the time had come when every man should declare his Tiger, should give it liberty and, whether he restrained it or no, acknowledge its existence.... Well, now--what I want to know is this. What to your thinking is going to come of it all? I'm old-fashioned. I like the old settled laws and customs and the rest of it, and yet I'm not afraid of this new Individualism; but what I expect and what you expect to come of it all are sure to be mightily different things."