who gave you your colour problem.  Bristol we may go through to-morrow and Gloucester, mother of I don’t know how many American Gloucesters.  Bath we’ll get in somehow.  And then as an Anglo-American showman I shall be tempted to run you northward a little way past Tewkesbury, just to go into a church here and there and show you monuments bearing little shields with the stars and stripes upon them, a few stars and a few stripes, the Washington family monuments.”

“It was not only from England that America came,” said Miss Grammont.

“But England takes an American memory back most easily and most fully—­to Avebury and the Baltic Northmen, past the emperors and the Corinthian columns that smothered Latin Europe....  For you and me anyhow this is our past, this was our childhood, and this is our land.”  He interrupted laughing as she was about to reply.  “Well, anyhow,” he said, “it is a beautiful day and a pretty country before us with the ripest history in every grain of its soil.  So we’ll send a wire to your London people and tell them to send their instructions to Wells.”

“I’ll tell Belinda,” she said, “to be quick with her packing.”

Section 7

As Miss Grammont and Sir Richmond Hardy fulfilled the details of his excellent programme and revised their impressions of the past and their ideas about the future in the springtime sunlight of Wiltshire and Somerset, with Miss Seyffert acting the part of an almost ostentatiously discreet chorus, it was inevitable that their conversation should become, by imperceptible gradations, more personal and intimate.  They kept up the pose, which was supposed to represent Dr. Martineau’s philosophy, of being Man and Woman on their Planet considering its Future, but insensibly they developed the idiosyncrasies of their position.  They might profess to be Man and Woman in the most general terms, but the facts that she was the daughter not of Everyman but old Grammont and that Sir Richmond was the angry leader of a minority upon the Fuel Commission became more and more important.  “What shall we do with this planet of ours?” gave way by the easiest transitions to “What are you and I doing and what have we got to do?  How do you feel about it all?  What do you desire and what do you dare?”

It was natural that Sir Richmond should talk of his Fuel Commission to a young woman whose interests in fuel were even greater than his own.  He found that she was very much better read than he was in the recent literature of socialism, and that she had what he considered to be a most unfeminine grasp of economic ideas.  He thought her attitude towards socialism a very sane one because it was also his own.  So far as socialism involved the idea of a scientific control of natural resources as a common property administered in the common interest, she and he were very greatly attracted by it; but so far as it served as a form of expression for the merely insubordinate