Direck went to work.  But quite early it was manifest to him that Cecily did not recognise his assumptions.  She was embarrassed when he got down one or two little presents of chocolates and flowers for her from London—­the Britling boys were much more appreciative—­she wouldn’t let him contrive costly little expeditions for her, and she protested against compliments and declared she would stay away when he paid them.  And she was not contented by his general sentiments about life, but asked the most direct questions about his occupation and his activities.  His chief occupation was being the well provided heir of a capable lawyer, and his activities in the light of her inquiries struck him as being light and a trifle amateurish, qualities he had never felt as any drawback about them before.  So that he had to rely rather upon aspirations and the possibility, under proper inspiration, of a more actively serviceable life in future.

“There’s a feeling in the States,” he said, “that we’ve had rather a tendency to overdo work, and that there is scope for a leisure class to develop the refinement and the wider meanings of life.”

“But a leisure class doesn’t mean a class that does nothing,” said Cecily.  “It only means a class that isn’t busy in business.”

“You’re too hard on me,” said Mr. Direck with that quiet smile of his.

And then by way of putting her on the defensive he asked her what she thought a man in his position ought to do.

“Something,” she said, and in the expansion of this vague demand they touched on a number of things.  She said that she was a Socialist, and there was still in Mr. Direck’s composition a streak of the old-fashioned American prejudice against the word.  He associated Socialists with Anarchists and deported aliens.  It was manifest too that she was deeply read in the essays and dissertations of Mr. Britling.  She thought everybody, man or woman, ought to be chiefly engaged in doing something definite for the world at large. ("There’s my secretaryship of the Massachusetts Modern Thought Society, anyhow,” said Mr. Direck.) And she herself wanted to be doing something—­it was just because she did not know what it was she ought to be doing that she was reading so extensively and voraciously.  She wanted to lose herself in something.  Deep in the being of Mr. Direck was the conviction that what she ought to be doing was making love in a rapturously egotistical manner, and enjoying every scrap of her own delightful self and her own delightful vitality—­while she had it, but for the purposes of their conversation he did not care to put it any more definitely than to say that he thought we owed it to ourselves to develop our personalities.  Upon which she joined issue with great vigour.

“That is just what Mr. Britling says about you in his ’American Impressions,’” she said.  “He says that America overdoes the development of personalities altogether, that whatever else is wrong about America that is where America is most clearly wrong.  I read that this morning, and directly I read it I thought, ’Yes, that’s exactly it!  Mr. Direck is overdoing the development of personalities.’”