“Don’t, don’t!” he said; “we’ve quite frightened poor Miss Mallow!”

Miss Mallow looked round at him, he looked at her, and all three once more looked at the sky.  It was the chief recreation of this little society.

Gregory worked till nearly three, and walked out to a bun-shop, where he lunched off a piece of cake and a cup of coffee.  He took an omnibus, and getting on the top, was driven West with a smile on his face and his hat in his hand.  He was thinking of Helen Bellew.  It had become a habit with him to think of her, the best and most beautiful of her sex—­a habit in which he was growing grey, and with which, therefore, he could not part.  And those women who saw him with his uncovered head smiled, and thought: 

‘What a fine-looking man!’

But George Pendyce, who saw him from the window of the Stoics’ Club, smiled a different smile; the sight of him was always a little unpleasant to George.

Nature, who had made Gregory Vigil a man, had long found that he had got out of her hands, and was living in celibacy, deprived of the comfort of woman, even of those poor creatures whom he befriended; and Nature, who cannot bear that man should escape her control, avenged herself through his nerves and a habit of blood to the head.  Extravagance, she said, I cannot have, and when I made this man I made him quite extravagant enough.  For his temperament (not uncommon in a misty climate) had been born seven feet high; and as a man cannot add a cubit to his stature, so neither can he take one off.  Gregory could not bear that a yellow man must always remain a yellow man, but trusted by care and attention some day to see him white.  There lives no mortal who has not a philosophy as distinct from every other mortal’s as his face is different from their faces; but Gregory believed that philosophers unfortunately alien must gain in time a likeness to himself if he were careful to tell them often that they had been mistaken.  Other men in this Great Britain had the same belief.

To Gregory’s reforming instinct it was a constant grief that he had been born refined.  A natural delicacy would interfere and mar his noblest efforts.  Hence failures deplored by Mrs. Pendyce to Lady Maiden the night they danced at Worsted Skeynes.

He left his bus near to the flat where Mrs. Bellow lived; with reverence he made the tour of the building and back again.  He had long fixed a rule, which he never broke, of seeing her only once a fortnight; but to pass her windows he went out of his way most days and nights.  And having made this tour, not conscious of having done anything ridiculous, still smiling, and with his hat on his knee, perhaps really happier because he had not seen her, was driven East, once more passing George Pendyce in the bow-window of the Stoics’ Club, and once more raising on his face a jeering smile.

He had been back at his rooms in Buckingham Street half an hour when a club commissionaire arrived with Mr. Paramor’s promised letter.