There are no amenities or urbanities of life in Murglebed to choke the growth of the Idea.  This evening it flourishes so exceedingly that I think it safe to transplant it in the alien soil of Q 3, The Albany, where the good Rogers must be leading an idle existence peculiarly deleterious to his morals.

This gives one furiously to think.  One of the responsibilities of eumoiriety must be the encouragement and development of virtue in my manservant.

Also in my young friend and secretary, Dale Kynnersley.  He is more to me than Rogers.  I may confess that, so long as Rogers is a sober, honest, me-fearing valet, in my heart of hearts I don’t care a hang about Rogers’s morals.  But about those of Dale Kynnersley I do.  I care a great deal for his career and happiness.  I have a notion that he is erring after strange goddesses and neglecting the little girl who is in love with him.  He must be delivered.  He must marry Maisie Ellerton, and the two of them must bring lots of capable, clear-eyed Kynnersleys into the world.  I long to be their ghostly godfather.

Then there’s Eleanor Faversham—­but if I begin to draw up a programme I shall lose that spontaneity of effort which, I take it, is one of the chief charms of dealing unto oneself a happy lot and portion.  No; my soul abhors tabulation.  It would make even six months’ life as jocular as Bradshaw’s Railway Guide or the dietary of a prison.  I prefer to look on what is before me as a high adventure, and with that prospect in view I propose to jot down my experiences from time to time, so that when I am wandering, a pale shade by Acheron, young Dale Kynnersley may have not only documentary evidence wherewith to convince my friends and relations that my latter actions were not those of a lunatic, but also, at the same time, an up-to-date version of Jeremy Taylor’s edifying though humour-lacking treatise on the act of dying, which I am sorely tempted to label “The Rule and Example of Eumoiriety.”  I shall resist the temptation, however.  Dale Kynnersley—­such is the ignorance of the new generation—­would have no sense of the allusion.  He would shake his head and say, “Dotty, poor old chap, dotty!” I can hear him.  And if, in order to prepare him, I gave him a copy of the “Meditations,” he would fling the book across the room and qualify Marcus Aurelius as a “rotter.”

Dale is a very shrewd fellow, and will make an admirable legislator when his time comes.  Although his highest intellectual recreation is reiterated attendance at the musical comedy that has caught his fancy for the moment and his favourite literature the sporting pages of the daily papers, he has a curious feline pounce on the salient facts of a political situation, and can thread the mazes of statistics with the certainty of a Hampton Court guide.  His enthusiastic researches (on my behalf) into pauper lunacy are remarkable in one so young.  I foresee him an invaluable chairman of committee.  But he will never become a statesman.  He has too passionate a faith in facts and figures, and has not cultivated a sense of humour at the expense of the philosophers.  Young men who do not read them lose a great deal of fun.