Sir Richmond suddenly remembered Miss Seyffert and half turned his face towards her.  Her forehead was just visible over the hood of the open coupe.  She appeared to be intelligently intent upon the scenery.  Then he broke out suddenly into a tirade against the world.  “But I am bored by this jostling unreasonable world.  At the bottom of my heart I am bitterly resentful to-day.  This is a world of fools and brutes in which we live, a world of idiotic traditions, imbecile limitations, cowardice, habit, greed and mean cruelty.  It is a slum of a world, a congested district, an insanitary jumble of souls and bodies.  Every good thing, every sweet desire is thwarted—­every one.  I have to lead the life of a slum missionary, a sanitary inspector, an underpaid teacher.  I am bored.  Oh God! how I am bored!  I am bored by our laws and customs.  I am bored by our rotten empire and its empty monarchy.  I am bored by its parades and its flags and its sham enthusiasms.  I am bored by London and its life, by its smart life and by its servile life alike.  I am bored by theatres and by books and by every sort of thing that people call pleasure.  I am bored by the brag of people and the claims of people and the feelings of people.  Damn people!  I am bored by profiteers and by the snatching they call business enterprise.  Damn every business man!  I am bored by politics and the universal mismanagement of everything.  I am bored by France, by Anglo-Saxondom, by German self-pity, by Bolshevik fanaticism.  I am bored by these fools’ squabbles that devastate the world.  I am bored by Ireland, Orange and Green.  Curse the Irish—­north and south together!  Lord! how I hate the Irish from Carson to the last Sinn Feiner!  And I am bored by India and by Egypt.  I am bored by Poland and by Islam.  I am bored by anyone who professes to have rights.  Damn their rights!  Curse their rights!  I am bored to death by this year and by last year and by the prospect of next year.  I am bored—­I am horribly bored—­by my work.  I am bored by every sort of renunciation.  I want to live with the woman I love and I want to work within the limits of my capacity.  Curse all Hullo!  Damn his eyes!—­Steady, ah!  The spark!...  Good!  No skid.”

He had come round a corner at five and twenty miles an hour and had stopped his spark and pulled up neatly within a yard of the fore-wheel of a waggon that was turning in the road so as to block the way completely.

“That almost had me....

“And now you feel better?” said Miss Grammont.

“Ever so much,” said Sir Richmond and chuckled.

The waggoner cleared the road and the car started up again.

For a minute or so neither spoke.

“You ought to be smacked hard for that outbreak,—­my dear,” said Miss Grammont.

“I ought—­my dear.  I have no right to be ill-tempered.  We two are among the supremely fortunate ones of our time.  We have no excuse for misbehaviour.  Got nothing to grumble at.  Always I am lucky.  That—­with the waggon—­was a very near thing.  God spoils us.