“We’ve got to do it,” said Thyme; “it won’t wait any longer.”

“My dear,” said Hilary, “think of Mr. Purcey!  What proportion of the upper classes do you imagine is even conscious of that necessity?  We, who have got what I call the social conscience, rise from the platform of Mr. Purcey; we’re just a gang of a few thousands to Mr. Purcey’s tens of thousands, and how many even of us are prepared, or, for the matter of that, fitted, to act on our consciousness?  In spite of your grandfather’s ideas, I’m afraid we’re all too much divided into classes; man acts, and always has acted, in classes.”

“Oh—­classes!” answered Thyme—­“that’s the old superstition, uncle.”

“Is it?  I thought one’s class, perhaps, was only oneself exaggerated—­not to be shaken off.  For instance, what are you and I, with our particular prejudices, going to do?”

Thyme gave him the cruel look of youth, which seemed to say:  ’You are my very good uncle, and a dear; but you are more than twice my age.  That, I think, is conclusive!’

“Has something been settled about Mrs. Hughs?” she asked abruptly.

“What does your father say this morning?”

Thyme picked up her portfolio of drawings, and moved towards the door.

“Father’s hopeless.  He hasn’t an idea beyond referring her to the S.P.B.”

She was gone; and Hilary, with a sigh, took his pen up, but he wrote nothing down ....

Hilary and Stephen Dallison were grandsons of that Canon Dallison, well known as friend, and sometime adviser, of a certain Victorian novelist.  The Canon, who came of an old Oxfordshire family, which for three hundred years at least had served the Church or State, was himself the author of two volumes of “Socratic Dialogues.”  He had bequeathed to his son—­a permanent official in the Foreign Office—­if not his literary talent, the tradition at all events of culture.  This tradition had in turn been handed on to Hilary and Stephen.

Educated at a public school and Cambridge, blessed with competent, though not large, independent incomes, and brought up never to allude to money if it could possibly be helped, the two young men had been turned out of the mint with something of the same outward stamp on them.  Both were kindly, both fond of open-air pursuits, and neither of them lazy.  Both, too, were very civilised, with that bone-deep decency, that dislike of violence, nowhere so prevalent as in the upper classes of a country whose settled institutions are as old as its roads, or the walls which insulate its parks.  But as time went on, the one great quality which heredity and education, environment and means, had bred in both of them—­self-consciousness—­acted in these two brothers very differently.  To Stephen it was preservative, keeping him, as it were, in ice throughout hot-weather seasons, enabling him to know exactly when he was in danger of decomposition, so that he might nip the process in the bud; it was with