“Gods!” I said, “I’d like to get him up just once before we smash. You read the papers? You know we’re going to smash?” “Oh! I read the papers. It’s scandalous, sir, such work as ours should depend on things like that. You and I ought to be under the State, sir, if you’ll excuse me.” “Nothing to excuse,” I said. “I’ve always been a Socialist—of a sort—in theory. Let’s go and have a look at him. How is he? Deflated?” “Just about quarter full. That last oil glaze of yours holds the gas something beautiful. He’s not lost a cubic metre a week.”... Cothope returned to Socialism as we went toward the sheds. “Glad to think you’re a Socialist, sir,” he said, “it’s the only civilised state. I been a Socialist some years—off the _Clarion_. It’s a rotten scramble, this world. It takes the things we make and invent and it plays the silly fool with ’em. We scientific people, we’ll have to take things over and stop all this financing and advertisement and that. It’s too silly. It’s a noosance. Look at us!” Lord Roberts β, even in his partially deflated condition in his shed, was a fine thing to stare up at. I stood side by side with Cothope regarding him, and it was borne in upon me more acutely than ever that all this had to end. I had a feeling just like the feeling of a boy who wants to do wrong, that I would use up the stuff while I had it before the creditors descended. I had a queer fancy, too, I remember, that if I could get into the air it would advertise my return to Beatrice. “We’ll fill her,” I said concisely. “It’s all ready,” said Cothope, and added as an afterthought, “unless they cut off the gas.”... I worked and interested myself with Cothope all the morning and for a time forgot my other troubles. But the thought of Beatrice flooded me slowly and steadily. It became an unintelligent sick longing to see her. I felt that I could not wait for the filling of Lord Roberts β, that I must hunt her up and see her soon. I got everything forward and lunched with Cothope, and then with the feeblest excuses left him in order to prowl down through the woods towards Bedley Corner. I became a prey to wretched hesitations and diffidence. Ought I to go near her now? I asked myself, reviewing all the social abasements of my early years. At last, about five, I called at the Dower House. I was greeted by their Charlotte—with a forbidding eye and a cold astonishment. Both Beatrice and Lady Osprey were out. There came into my head some prowling dream of meeting her. I went along the lane towards Woking, the lane down which we had walked five months ago in the wind and rain. I mooned for a time in our former footsteps, then swore and turned back across the fields, and then conceived a distaste for Cothope and went Downward. At last I found myself looking down on the huge abandoned masses of the Crest Hill house.