A tall, imposing person stood under a Japanese print holding the palm of one hand outspread; his unwieldy trunk and thin legs wobbled in concert to his ingratiating voice.

“War,” he was saying, “is not necessary.  War is not necessary.  I hope I make myself clear.  War is not necessary; it depends on nationality, but nationality is not necessary.”  He inclined his head to one side, “Why do we have nationality?  Let us do away with boundaries—­let us have the warfare of commerce.  If I see France looking at Brighton”—­he laid his head upon one side, and beamed at Shelton,—­“what do I do?  Do I say ‘Hands off’?  No.  ‘Take it,’ I say—­take it!’” He archly smiled.  “But do you think they would?”

And the softness of his contours fascinated Shelton.

“The soldier,” the person underneath the print resumed, “is necessarily on a lower plane—­intellectually—­oh, intellectually—­than the philanthropist.  His sufferings are less acute; he enjoys the compensations of advertisement—­you admit that?” he breathed persuasively.  “For instance—­I am quite impersonal—­I suffer; but do I talk about it?” But, someone gazing at his well-filled waistcoat, he put his thesis in another form:  “I have one acre and one cow, my brother has one acre and one cow:  do I seek to take them away from him?”

Shelton hazarded, “Perhaps you ’re weaker than your brother.”

“Come, come!  Take the case of women:  now, I consider our marriage laws are barbarous.”

For the first time Shelton conceived respect for them; he made a comprehensive gesture, and edged himself into the conversation of another group, for fear of having all his prejudices overturned.  Here an Irish sculptor, standing in a curve, was saying furiously, “Bees are not bhumpkins, d—–­n their sowls!” A Scotch painter, who listened with a curly smile, seemed trying to compromise this proposition, which appeared to have relation to the middle classes; and though agreeing with the Irishman, Shelton felt nervous over his discharge of electricity.  Next to them two American ladies, assembled under the tent of hair belonging to a writer of songs, were discussing the emotions aroused in them by Wagner’s operas.

“They produce a strange condition of affairs in me,” said the thinner one.

“They ’re just divine,” said the fatter.

“I don’t know if you can call the fleshly lusts divine,” replied the thinner, looking into the eyes of the writer of the songs.

Amidst all the hum of voices and the fumes of smoke, a sense of formality was haunting Shelton.  Sandwiched between a Dutchman and a Prussian poet, he could understand neither of his neighbours; so, assuming an intelligent expression, he fell to thinking that an assemblage of free spirits is as much bound by the convention of exchanging their ideas as commonplace people are by the convention of having no ideas to traffic in.  He could not help wondering whether, in the bulk,