High over Heaven the lamps of midnight burned
     Ere, weak with merriment, the Four returned,
     Not in that order they were wont to keep—­
     Pinion to pinion answering, sweep for sweep,
     In awful diapason heard afar,
     But shoutingly adrift ’twixt star and star. 
     Reeling a planet’s orbit left or right
     As laughter took them in the abysmal Night;
     Or, by the point of some remembered jest,
     Winged and brought helpless down through gulfs unguessed,
     Where the blank worlds that gather to the birth
     Leaped in the womb of Darkness at their mirth,
     And e’en Gehenna’s bondsmen understood. 
     They were not damned from human brotherhood.

     Not first nor last of Heaven’s high Host, the Four
     That night took place beneath The Throne once more. 
     O lovelier than their morning majesty,
     The understanding light behind the eye! 
     O more compelling than their old command,
     The new-learned friendly gesture of the hand! 
     O sweeter than their zealous fellowship,
     The wise half-smile that passed from lip to lip! 
     O well and roundly, when Command was given,
     They told their tale against themselves to Heaven,
     And in the silence, waiting on The Word,
     Received the Peace and Pardon of The Lord!

‘My Son’s Wife’

(1913)

He had suffered from the disease of the century since his early youth, and before he was thirty he was heavily marked with it.  He and a few friends had rearranged Heaven very comfortably, but the reorganisation of Earth, which they called Society, was even greater fun.  It demanded Work in the shape of many taxi-rides daily; hours of brilliant talk with brilliant talkers; some sparkling correspondence; a few silences (but on the understanding that their own turn should come soon) while other people expounded philosophies; and a fair number of picture-galleries, tea-fights, concerts, theatres, music-halls, and cinema shows; the whole trimmed with love-making to women whose hair smelt of cigarette-smoke.  Such strong days sent Frankwell Midmore back to his flat assured that he and his friends had helped the World a step nearer the Truth, the Dawn, and the New Order.

His temperament, he said, led him more towards concrete data than abstract ideas.  People who investigate detail are apt to be tired at the day’s end.  The same temperament, or it may have been a woman, made him early attach himself to the Immoderate Left of his Cause in the capacity of an experimenter in Social Relations.  And since the Immoderate Left contains plenty of women anxious to help earnest inquirers with large independent incomes to arrive at evaluations of essentials, Frankwell Midmore’s lot was far from contemptible.