But occasionally among the multitude of conversations that gave her nothing, there would come some talk that illuminated and for the time almost reconciled her to the effort and the loss of time and distraction her social expeditions involved. One evening at one of Lady Tarvrille’s carelessly compiled parties she encountered Edgar Wilkins the novelist and got the most suggestive glimpses of his attitude towards himself and towards the world of intellectual ferment to which he belonged. She had been taken down by an amiable but entirely uninteresting permanent official who when the time came turned his stereotyped talk over to the other side of him with a quiet mechanical indifference, and she was left for a little while in silence until Wilkins had disengaged himself. He was a flushed man with untidy hair, and he opened at once with an appeal to her sympathies. “Oh! Bother!” he said. “I say,—I’ve eaten that mutton. I didn’t notice. One eats too much at these affairs. One doesn’t notice at the time and then afterwards one finds out.” She was a little surprised at his gambit and could think of nothing but a kindly murmur. “Detestable thing,” he said; “my body.” “But surely not,” she tried and felt as she said it that was a trifle bold. “You’re all right,” he said making her aware he saw her. “But I’ve this thing that wheezes and fattens at the slightest excuse and—it encumbers me—bothers me to take exercise.... But I can hardly expect you to be interested in my troubles, can I?” He made an all too manifest attempt to read her name on the slip of card that lay before her among the flowers and as manifestly succeeded. “We people who write and paint and all that sort of thing are a breed of insatiable egotists, Lady Harman. With the least excuse. Don’t you think so?” “Not—not exceptionally,” she said. “Exceptionally,” he insisted. “It isn’t my impression,” she said. “You’re—franker.” “But someone was telling me—you’ve been taking impressions of us lately. I mean all of us people who go flapping ideas about in the air. Somebody—was it Lady Beach-Mandarin?—was saying you’d come out looking for Intellectual Heroes—and found Bernard Shaw.... But what could you have expected?” “I’ve been trying to find out and understand what people are thinking. I want ideas.” “It’s disheartening, isn’t it?” “It’s—perplexing sometimes.” “You go to meetings, and try to get to the bottom of Movements, and you want to meet and know the people who write the wonderful things? Get at the wonderful core of it?” “One feels there are things going on.” “Great illuminating things.” “Well—yes.” “And when you see those great Thinkers and Teachers and Guides and Brave Spirits and High Brows generally——” He laughed and stopped just in time on the very verge of taking pheasant. “Oh, take it away,” he cried sharply. “We’ve all been through that illusion, Lady Harman,” he went on. “But I don’t like to think——Aren’t Great Men after all—great?”