“No . . . he’s not well known, but I believe he’s pretty good.” And so they talked on, deciding that the world was ripe for great poetical achievement, awed to think that perhaps they were living, without knowing it, in the beginning of a great age of literature; convinced, to a degree of enthusiasm, of the splendour and magnanimity of the calling that they had adopted; conscious—thrillingly conscious—of the fact that the whole world lay before them full of undreamed delights as mysterious and yet as clear as the wintry sky. Edwin had to run for his train. He didn’t mind running. On a night like this he felt that violent exercise was a mode of expressing the curious elation that his talk with Boyce, and his excitement in the new friendship that promised so many hours of happiness, had given him. At the gates of the station he paused to buy an evening paper. It contained the news of Buller’s defeat at Colenso and the result of a cup-tie between North Bromwich Albion and Notts Forest, but he had no room in his mind for football or for this African war in which W.G., to the ruin of his future finances, was itching to enlist. Edwin’s thoughts were of the great names and the great works of which he and Boyce had been talking. The newspaper lay folded on his knees; the flares of the black country swept past him in the night, unseen. He was not even aware of the other occupants of the carriage until he suddenly found himself staring straight into the eyes of his opposite, whom he recognised as Edward Willis, the son of Walter Willis of the Great Mawne Furnaces. All Aunt Laura’s attempts, heroically made in the interests of social advancement, had so far failed to bring about a friendship between these two. Edwin, on his side, could never get out of his head an unreasonable prejudice against the Willises, the natural result of Aunt Laura’s adulation of their wealth, and even a knowledge of his own humble origins had not affected his traditional distrust of people whom he regarded as flashy and self-made. In Edward Willis he found a creature even more shy than himself, and the very fact that Mrs. Willis and Aunt Laura, putting their heads together, had decided to throw them into each other’s arms, was enough to create an atmosphere of distrust and uneasiness. The sudden recognition in the railway carriage was merely an embarrassment. Edwin was startled into saying “Hallo,” and Willis replied in exactly the same way; then both of them retired with precipitation to the cover of their evening newspapers, from which they listened to the conversation of a commercial traveller who was returning home from London and had all the latest and most authentic gossip on the South African situation.