Failing the East Anglian Pageant, the paper's "first feature," I noticed, consisted of a lot of generously headed particulars regarding the big Disarmament Demonstration to be held in Hyde Park that afternoon. It seemed that this was to be a really big thing, and I decided to attend in the interests of _The Mass_. The President of the Local Government Board and three well-known members on the Government side of the House were to speak. The Demonstration had been organized by the National Peace Association for Disarmament and Social Reform, of which the Prime Minister had lately been elected President. Delegates, both German and English, of the Anglo-German Union had promised to deliver addresses. Among other well-known bodies who were sending representatives I saw mention of the Anti-Imperial and Free Tariff Society, the Independent English Guild, the Home Rule Association, the Free Trade League, and various Republican and Socialist bodies. The paper said some amusement was anticipated from a suggested counter demonstration proposed by a few Navy League enthusiasts; but that the police would take good care that no serious interruptions were allowed. As the Demonstration was fixed for three o'clock in the afternoon, I decided to go up the river by steamboat to Kew after my late breakfast. It was a gloriously fine morning, and on the river I began to feel a little more cheerful. As we passed Battersea Park I thought of Beatrice, who always suffered from severe depressions after her little outings. Her spirits were affected; in my case, restaurant food, inferior wine, and the breathing of vitiated air was paid for by nothing worse than a headache and a morning's discomfort. (One of the curses of the time, which seemed to grow more acute as the habit of extravagance and the thirst for pleasure increased, was the outrageous adulteration of all food-stuffs, and more particularly of all alcoholic liquors, which prevailed not alone in the West End of London, but in every city. Home products could only be obtained in clubs and in the houses of the rich. Their quantity was insufficient to admit of their reaching the open markets. In the cities we lived entirely upon foreign products, and their adulteration had reached a most amazing limit of badness.) My thought of Beatrice was brief that morning, but I continued during most of my little excursion to dwell upon my new friends in South Kensington. I wondered how Constance Grey spent Sunday in London, and whether the confinement of the town oppressed her after the spacious freedom of the South African life she had described to me. I remembered that I had promised to call upon her and her aunt very soon, and wondered whether that afternoon, after the Demonstration, would be too soon. I mentally decided that it would, but that I would go all the same. And then, suddenly, as the steamer passed under Hammersmith Bridge, a thought went through me like cold steel: