“One gets so infernally sick of everything happening according to fixed rules,” I continued.  “And the more you learn the nearer you are to the deadly ability of being able to foretell the future.  If we ever do reach that point in our intellectual evolution, I only hope that I shan’t be there to see it.  Imagine the awful ennui of a world where the expected always happened, and next year’s happenings were always expected!  And yet we go on seeking after knowledge, when we ought surely to avoid it, as the universal kill joy.”

“Hm!” commented my new friend on what I felt to be a note of doubtful agreement.

“You don’t agree with that?” I asked.

“Well, I see what you’re after, in a way,” he acknowledged; “but it doesn’t seem to me that it amounts to very much—­practically.”

I was a trifle disappointed.  I had not expected any insistence on the practical from a man who could whistle Schubert and Shakespeare to the dawn.

“Oh, practically!  Perhaps not,” I replied with a hint of contempt for anything so common.

He gave a little self-conscious laugh.  “You can’t get away from the practical in this life,” he said.  “Even in—­” He seemed to bite off the beginning of confidence with an effort.  “You may dream half the night,” he began again, with a thin assumption of making an impersonal statement, “but before the night’s over you’ll come up against the practical, or the practicable, or the proper right thing, or something, that makes you see what a fool you are.  The way this world’s run, you can’t avoid it, anyhow.”

I knew that what he said was true, but I found it damping.  It fitted all too well with the coming realism of day.  The contours of the landscape were slowly resigning themselves to the formal attitudes imposed upon them by expectation.  The blood of colour was beginning to run weakly through the monochrome.  The nearer slopes of the hill and the leaves of the trees were already professing a resolute green.  Moment by moment the familiar was taking prudent shape, preparing itself for the autocrat whose outriders were multitudinously busy about their warnings of his approach.  Presently the scene would take on the natural beauty of our desire, but the actual process of transformation rather depressed me that morning.  I had been so deeply in love with the night.

I took up my companion’s last sentence—­spoken, I fancied, with a suggestion of brooding antagonism.

“You think the world might be ‘run,’ at least, more interestingly?” I put in.

“More sensibly,” he said in a voice that hinted a reserve of violence.  “There’s no sense in it, the way we look at things.  Only we don’t look at ’em, most of us, not with any intelligence.  We just take everything for granted because we happen to be used to it, that’s all.”

“But would any form of socialism...”  I tried tentatively.

“I don’t know that I’m a socialist,” he returned.  “I don’t belong to any union, or anything of that kind.”  He stopped and looked at me with a defiant stare that was quite visible now.  “You know who I am, I suppose?” he challenged me.