Tenderly she rumpled Irene’s hair. And at this very moment, Mr. Falx was meditating, at this very moment, on tram-cars in the Argentine, among Peruvian guano-beds, in humming power-stations at the foot of African waterfalls, in Australian refrigerators packed with slaughtered mutton, in the heat and darkness of Yorkshire coal-mines, in tea-plantations on the slopes of the Himalaya, in Japanese banks, at the mouth of Mexican oil-wells, in steamers walloping along across the China Sea—at this very moment, men and women of every race and colour were doing their bit to supply Mrs. Aldwinkle with her income. On the two hundred and seventy thousand pounds of Mrs. Aldwinkle’s capital the sun never set. People worked; Mrs. Aldwinkle led the higher life. She for art only, they—albeit unconscious of the privilege—for art in her. Young Lord Hovenden sighed. If only it were he whose fingers were playing in the smooth thick tresses of Irene’s hair! It seemed an awful waste that she should be so fond of her Aunt Lilian. Somehow, the more he liked Irene the less he liked Aunt Lilian. “Haven’t you sometimes longed to be an artist yourself, Hovenden?” Mrs. Aldwinkle suddenly asked. She leaned forward, her eyes glittering with the reflected light of two or three hundred million remote suns. She was going to suggest that he might try his hand at poetical rhapsodies about political injustice and the condition of the lower classes. Something half-way between Shelley and Walt Whitman. “Me!” said Hovenden in astonishment. Then he laughed aloud: Ha, ha, ha! It was a jarring note. Mrs. Aldwinkle drew back, pained. “I don’t know why you should think the idea so impossibly comic,” she said. “Perhaps he has other work to do,” said Mr. Falx out of the darkness. “More important work.” And at the sound of that thrilling, deep, prophetical voice Lord Hovenden felt that, indeed, he had. “More important?” queried Mrs. Aldwinkle. “But can anything be more important? When one thinks of Flaubert....” One thought of Flaubert—working through all a fifty-four hour week at a relative clause. But Mrs. Aldwinkle was too enthusiastic to be able to say what followed when one had thought of Flaubert. “Think of coal-miners for a change,” said Mr. Falx in answer. “That’s what I suggest.” “Yes,” Lord Hovenden agreed, gravely nodding. A lot of his money came from coal. He felt particularly responsible for miners when he had time to think of them. “Think,” said Mr. Falx in his deep voice; and he relapsed into a silence more eloquently prophetical than any speech.