The same fanaticism, which looked on his passion as a flower by itself, entirely apart from its suitability to the social garden, was also the driving force which sent him up to London to declare his intention to his father before he spoke to Mrs. Noel.  The thing should be done simply, and in right order.  For he had the kind of moral courage found in those who live retired within the shell of their own aspirations.  Yet it was not perhaps so much active moral courage as indifference to what others thought or did, coming from his inbred resistance to the appreciation of what they felt.

That peculiar smile of the old Tudor Cardinal—­which had in it invincible self-reliance, and a sort of spiritual sneer—­played over his face when he speculated on his father’s reception of the coming news; and very soon he ceased to think of it at all, burying himself in the work he had brought with him for the journey.  For he had in high degree the faculty, so essential to public life, of switching off his whole attention from one subject to another.

On arriving at Paddington he drove straight to Valleys House.

This large dwelling with its pillared portico, seemed to wear an air of faint surprise that, at the height of the season, it was not more inhabited.  Three servants relieved Miltoun of his little luggage; and having washed, and learned that his father would be dining in, he went for a walk, taking his way towards his rooms in the Temple.  His long figure, somewhat carelessly garbed, attracted the usual attention, of which he was as usual unaware.  Strolling along, he meditated deeply on a London, an England, different from this flatulent hurly-burly, this ‘omniuin gatherum’, this great discordant symphony of sharps and flats.  A London, an England, kempt and self-respecting; swept and garnished of slums, and plutocrats, advertisement, and jerry-building, of sensationalism, vulgarity, vice, and unemployment.  An England where each man should know his place, and never change it, but serve in it loyally in his own caste.  Where every man, from nobleman to labourer, should be an oligarch by faith, and a gentleman by practice.  An England so steel-bright and efficient that the very sight should suffice to impose peace.  An England whose soul should be stoical and fine with the stoicism and fineness of each soul amongst her many million souls; where the town should have its creed and the country its creed, and there should be contentment and no complaining in her streets.

And as he walked down the Strand, a little ragged boy cheeped out between his legs: 

“Bloodee discoveree in a Bank—­Grite sensytion!  Pi-er!”

Miltoun paid no heed to that saying; yet, with it, the wind that blows where man lives, the careless, wonderful, unordered wind, had dispersed his austere and formal vision.  Great was that wind—­the myriad aspiration of men and women, the praying of the uncounted multitude to the goddess of Sensation—­of Chance, and Change.  A flowing from heart to heart, from lip to lip, as in Spring the wistful air wanders through a wood, imparting to every bush and tree the secrets of fresh life, the passionate resolve to grow, and become—­no matter what!  A sighing, as eternal as the old murmuring of the sea, as little to be hushed, as prone to swell into sudden roaring!