It was just like going to Checkshill in the old time, after writing about socialism. . . .

I relinquished her hand.  It was absurd to part in these terms.

So we all felt it.  We hung awkwardly over our sense of that.  It was Verrall, I think, who shaped the thought for me, and said that to-morrow then we must meet and say good-bye, and so turned our encounter into a transitory making of arrangements.  We settled we would come to the inn at Menton, all three of us, and take our midday meal together. . . .

Yes, it was clear that was all we had to say now. . . .

We parted a little awkwardly.  I went on down the village street, not looking back, surprised at myself, and infinitely perplexed.  It was as if I had discovered something overlooked that disarranged all my plans, something entirely disconcerting.  For the first time I went back preoccupied and without eagerness to Melmount’s work.  I wanted to go on thinking about Nettie; my mind had suddenly become voluminously productive concerning her and Verrall.

Section 2

The talk we three had together in the dawn of the new time is very strongly impressed upon my memory.  There was something fresh and simple about it, something young and flushed and exalted.  We took up, we handled with a certain naive timidity, the most difficult questions the Change had raised for men to solve.  I recall we made little of them.  All the old scheme of human life had dissolved and passed away, the narrow competitiveness, the greed and base aggression, the jealous aloofness of soul from soul.  Where had it left us?  That was what we and a thousand million others were discussing. . . .

It chances that this last meeting with Nettie is inseparably associated—­I don’t know why—­with the landlady of the Menton inn.

The Menton inn was one of the rare pleasant corners of the old order; it was an inn of an unusual prosperity, much frequented by visitors from Shaphambury, and given to the serving of lunches and teas.  It had a broad mossy bowling-green, and round about it were creeper-covered arbors amidst beds of snap-dragon, and hollyhock, and blue delphinium, and many such tall familiar summer flowers.  These stood out against a background of laurels and holly, and above these again rose the gables of the inn and its signpost—­a white-horsed George slaying the dragon—­against copper beeches under the sky.

While I waited for Nettie and Verrall in this agreeable trysting place, I talked to the landlady—­a broad-shouldered, smiling, freckled woman—­about the morning of the Change.  That motherly, abundant, red-haired figure of health was buoyantly sure that everything in the world was now to be changed for the better.  That confidence, and something in her voice, made me love her as I talked to her.  “Now we’re awake,” she said, “all sorts of things will be put right that hadn’t any sense in them.  Why?  Oh!  I’m sure of it.”