“We two,” he went on, after a pause, “are among the most fortunate people alive.  We are both rich and easily rich.  That gives us freedoms few people have.  We have a vision of the whole world in which we live.  It’s in a mess—­but that is by the way.  The mass of mankind never gets enough education to have even a glimpse of the world as a whole.  They never get a chance to get the hang of it.  It is really possible for us to do things that will matter in the world.  All our time is our own; all our abilities we are free to use.  Most people, most intelligent and educated people, are caught in cages of pecuniary necessity; they are tied to tasks they can’t leave, they are driven and compelled and limited by circumstances they can never master.  But we, if we have tasks, have tasks of our own choosing.  We may not like the world, but anyhow we are free to do our best to alter it.  If I were a clerk in Hoxton and you were a city typist, then we might swear.”

“It was you who swore,” smiled Miss Grammont.

“It’s the thought of that clerk in Hoxton and that city typist who really keep me at my work.  Any smacking ought to come from them.  I couldn’t do less than I do in the face of their helplessness.  Nevertheless a day will come—­through what we do and what we refrain from doing when there will be no bound and limited clerks in Hoxton and no captive typists in the city.  And nobody at all to consider.”

“According to the prophet Martineau,” said Miss Grammont.

“And then you and I must contrive to be born again.”

“Heighho!” cried Miss Grammont.  “A thousand years ahead!  When fathers are civilized.  When all these phanton people who intervene on your side—­no!  I don’t want to know anything about them, but I know of them by instinct—­when they also don’t matter.”

“Then you and I can have things out with each other—­thoroughly,” said Sir Richmond, with a surprising ferocity in his voice, charging the little hill before him as though he charged at Time.

Section 6

They had to wait at Nailsworth for a telegram from Mr. Grammont’s agents; they lunched there and drove on to Bath in the afternoon.  They came into the town through unattractive and unworthy outskirts, and only realized the charm of the place after they had garaged their car at the Pulteney Hotel and walked back over the Pulteney Bridge to see the Avon with the Pump Room and the Roman Baths.  The Pulteney they found hung with pictures and adorned with sculpture to an astonishing extent; some former proprietor must have had a mania for replicas and the place is eventful with white marble fauns and sylphs and lions and Caesars and Queen Victorias and packed like an exhibition with memories of Rome, Florence, Milan, Paris, the National Gallery and the Royal Academy, amidst which splendours a competent staff administers modern comforts with an old-fashioned civility.  But round and about the Pulteney one has still the scenery of Georgian England, the white, faintly classical terraces and houses of the days of Fielding, Smollett, Fanny Burney and Jane Austen, the graceful bridge with the bright little shops full of “presents from Bath”; the Pump Room with its water drinkers and a fine array of the original Bath chairs.