"By Jove, I must be getting back, too, or I shall keep the governor waiting, and he doesn't like that." "If you do, tell him it's my fault." The boy looked at her, then at me, again blushed a little, and laughed. The slightest flush appeared on Jenny's smiling face. I took the opportunity to light a cigarette. The morning races had not been talked about at Fillingford! "Well no--you mustn't put it on the woman, must you?" said Jenny, as she waved a laughing farewell. On our way home she was silent and thoughtful, speaking only now and then and answering one or two remarks of mine rather absently. One observation threw some light on her thoughts. "It's very awkward that Mr. Octon should make himself so unpopular. I want to be friends with everybody, but--" She broke off. I did no more than give a nod of assent. But I knew--and thought she must--how Octon stood. He was considered to have made himself impossible. He was not asked to Fillingford; Aspenick had bluntly declared that he would not meet him on account of a rude speech of Octon's, leveled at Lady Aspenick; Bertram Ware and he were at daggers drawn over some semipolitical semiprivate squabble in which Octon's language had been of more than its usual violence. The town loved him no better than the county. Jenny wanted to be popular everywhere--popular, influential, acclaimed. She was weighted by this unpopular friendship--which yet had such attraction for her. The cares of state had fastened on her again as we jogged homeward. Well, they were the joy of her life--it would have needed a dull man not soon to see that. The real joy, I mean--not what at that moment--nay, nor perhaps at any moment--she would herself have named as her delight. Her joy in the sense in which we creatures--and the wisest among us long ago--come nearest to being able to understand and define the innermost engine or instinct whose working is most truly ourselves--the temptation to live and life itself which pair nature has so cunningly coupled together. Effective activity--the reaching out to make of external things and people (especially, perhaps, things and people that obstinately resist) part of our own domain--their currency coinage of ours, with the stamp of our mint, bearing our superscription--causing the writ of our issuing to run where it did not run before--is not this, however ill-expressed (and bigger men than I have failed, and will fail, fully to express it), something like what the human spirit attempts? Or is there, too, a true gospel of drawing in--of renouncing? In the essential, mind you!--It is easy in trifles, in indulgences and luxuries. But to surrender the exercise and expansion of self? If that be right, if that be true--at any rate it was not Jenny Driver. She was a strong, natural-born swimmer, cast now for the first time into open sea--after the duck ponds of her Smalls and her Simpsons. It was not the smooth waters which tested, tried, or in innermost truth delighted her most.