Tallente took off his hat.  He was watching the lights from the two great hotels, the red fires from the funnel of a little tug, Mack and mysterious in the windy darkness.

“I am sick of politics,” he declared suddenly.  “We are a parcel of fools.  Our feet move day and night to the solemn music.”

“You, of all men,” she protested, “to be talking like this!”

“I mean it,” he insisted, a little doggedly.  “I have spent too many of my years on the treadmill.  A man was born to be either an egoist and parcel out the earth according to his tastes, or to develop like Dartrey into a dreamer.—­Curse you!” he added, suddenly shaking his fist at the tall towers of the Houses of Parliament.  “You’re like an infernal boarding-school, with your detentions and impositions and castigations.  There must be something beyond.”

“A Cabinet Minister—­” she began.

“The sixth form,” he interrupted.  “There’s just one aspiration of life to be granted under that roof and to win it you are asked to stifle all the rest.  It isn’t worth it.”

“It’s the greatest game at which men can play,” she declared.

“And also the narrowest because it is the most absorbing,” he answered.  “We have our triumphs there and they end in a chuckle.  Don’t you love sunshine in winter, strange cities, pictures, pictures of another age, pictures which take your thoughts back into another world, architecture that is not utilitarian, the faces of human beings on whom the strain of life has never fallen?  And women—­women whose eyes will laugh into yours, who haven’t a single view in life, who don’t care a fig about improving their race, who want just love, to give and to take?”

She gazed at him in astonishment, a little carried away, her eyes soft, her lips parted.

“But you have turned pagan!” she cried.

“An instant’s revolt against the methodism of life,” he replied, his feet once more upon the earth.  “But the feeling’s there, all the same,” he went on doggedly.  “I want to leave school.  I have been there so long.  It seems to me my holiday is overdue.”

She passed her arm through his.  She was a very clever and a very understanding woman.

“That comes of your having ignored us,” she murmured.

“It isn’t my fault if I have,” he reminded her.

“In a sense it is,” she insisted.  “The woman in your life should be the most beautiful part of it.  You chose to make her the stepping-stone to your ambition.  Consequently you go through life hungry, you wait till you almost starve, and then suddenly the greatest things in the world which lie to your hand seem like baubles.”

“You are hideously logical,” he grumbled.

They were walking slower now, within a few yards of the entrance to her flat.  Both of them were a little disturbed,—­she, full as she was with all the generous impulses of sensuous humanity, intensely awakened, intensely sympathetic.