undemonstrative assurance of his walk, he bore resemblance to the couple he apostrophised.  “Ah!” he thought, “how vulgar our refinement is!” But he hardly believed in his own outburst.  These people were so well mannered, so well conducted, and so healthy, he could not really understand what irritated him.  What was the matter with them?  They fulfilled their duties, had good appetites, clear consciences, all the furniture of perfect citizens; they merely lacked-feelers, a loss that, he had read, was suffered by plants and animals which no longer had a need for using them.  Some rare national faculty of seeing only the obvious and materially useful had destroyed their power of catching gleams or scents to right or left.

The lady looked up at her husband.  The light of quiet, proprietary affection shone in her calm grey eyes, decorously illumining her features slightly reddened by the wind.  And the husband looked back at her, calm, practical, protecting.  They were very much alike.  So doubtless he looked when he presented himself in snowy shirt-sleeves for her to straighten the bow of his white tie; so nightly she would look, standing before the full-length mirror, fixing his gifts upon her bosom.  Calm, proprietary, kind!  He passed them and walked behind a second less distinguished couple, who manifested a mutual dislike as matter-of-fact and free from nonsense as the unruffled satisfaction of the first; this dislike was just as healthy, and produced in Shelton about the same sensation.  It was like knocking at a never-opened door, looking at a circle—­couple after couple all the same.  No heads, toes, angles of their souls stuck out anywhere.  In the sea of their environments they were drowned; no leg braved the air, no arm emerged wet and naked waving at the skies; shop-persons, aristocrats, workmen, officials, they were all respectable.  And he himself as respectable as any.

He returned, thus moody, to his rooms and, with the impetuosity which distinguished him when about to do an unwise thing, he seized a pen and poured out before Antonia some of his impressions: 

. . . .  Mean is the word, darling; we are mean, that’s what ’s the matter with us, dukes and dustmen, the whole human species—­as mean as caterpillars.  To secure our own property and our own comfort, to dole out our sympathy according to rule just so that it won’t really hurt us, is what we’re all after.  There’s something about human nature that is awfully repulsive, and the healthier people are, the more repulsive they seem to me to be . . . .

He paused, biting his pen.  Had he one acquaintance who would not counsel him to see a doctor for writing in that style?  How would the world go round, how could Society exist, without common-sense, practical ability, and the lack of sympathy?

He looked out of the open window.  Down in the street a footman was settling the rug over the knees of a lady in a carriage, and the decorous immovability of both their faces, which were clearly visible to him, was like a portion of some well-oiled engine.