"She will very soon return to that freer, wider life out there in South Africa." How I hated the place. South Africa! I had always associated it with Imperialism, militarism--"empireism," as I called it in my own mind: the strange, outside interests, which one regarded as opposing home interests, social reform, and the like. Though I did not know that any political party considerations influenced me one atom, I was in reality, like nearly every one else at that time, mentally the slave and creature of party feeling, party tradition, party prejudice. But now I had a new cause for hating those remote uplands of Empire, those outside places. Sitting under a tree in Kew Gardens, I had leisure in which to browse over the matter, and, upon reflection, I was astonished that this sudden thought of mine should have struck so shrewdly, so violently, into my peace of mind. I tried to neutralize its effect by reminding myself that I had met Constance Grey only twice; that she was in many ways outside my purview; that she was the intimate friend of people who had helped to make history, the special contributor to _The Times_, with her introductions to ex-Cabinet Ministers in England and her other relations with great people; that such a woman could never play an intimate part in my life. Her friendliness could not be the prelude to friendship with the assistant editor of _The Mass_; it probably meant no more than a courteous deference to John Crondall's whim, I told myself. But I would call at the South Kensington flat, certainly; it would be boorish to refrain, and--there was no denying I should have been mightily perturbed if any valid reason had appeared against my going to see Constance Grey after doing my duty by the Demonstration. The newsboys were putting a good deal of feeling into their crying of special editions when I reached the streets again; but I was not inclined to waste further pence upon the _Sunday News'_ moralizings over the evolution of _canards_. I took a mess of some adulterated pottage at a foreign restaurant in Notting Hill, as I had no wish to return to Bloomsbury before the Demonstration. The waiter--either a Swiss or a German--asked me: "Vad you sink, sare, of ze news from ze country?" I asked him what it was, and he handed me a fresh copy of the _Sunday News_, headed: "Special Edition. Noon." "By Jove!" I thought; "no Sunday dinner for Wardle! They couldn't have printed this in the small hours." But the only new matter in this issue was a short announcement, headed in poster type, as follows: "EAST ANGLIA'S ISOLATION RAILWAY COMMUNICATION STOPPED STRANGE SUPPORT OF INVASION CANARD _IS THIS A TORY HOAX?_ (SPECIAL)