“Yes; but I shouldn’t have known it was a sycamore.  How is it you know trees so well?”

“That’s my father’s doing,” replied Dyce.  “He used to teach me them when I was a youngster.”

“Mine was thinking more about social statistics.  I knew the number of paupers in London before I had learnt to distinguish between an ash and an oak.  Do you ever hear from your father?”

“Now and then,” said Lashmar, his machine wobbling a little, for he had not yet perfect command of it, and fell into some peril if his thoughts strayed.  “They want me to run over to Alverholme presently.  Perhaps I may go next week.”

Constance was silent.  They wheeled on, without speaking, for some minutes.  Then Dyce asked: 

“How long does Lady Ogram wish me to stay here?”

“I don’t quite know.  Are you in any hurry to get away?”

“Not at all.  Only, if I’m soon going back to London, I should take Alverholme on the journey.  Would you probe our friend for me?”

“I’ll try.”

At this time, they were both reading a book of Nietzsche.  That philosopher had only just fallen into their hands, though of course they had heard much of him.  Lashmar found the matter considerably to his taste, though he ridiculed the form.  Nietzsche’s individualism was, up to a certain point, in full harmony with the tone of his mind; he enjoyed this frank contempt of the average man, persuaded that his own place was on the seat of the lofty, and that disdain of the humdrum, in life or in speculation, had always been his strong point.  To be sure, he counted himself Nietzsche’s superior as a moralist; as a thinker, he imagined himself much more scientific.  But, having regard to his circumstances and his hopes, this glorification of unscrupulous strength came opportunely.  Refining away its grosser aspects, Dyce took the philosophy to heart—­much more sincerely than he had taken to himself the humanitarian bio-sociology on which he sought to build his reputation.

And Constance, for her part, was hardly less interested in Nietzsche.  She, too, secretly liked this insistence on the right of the strong, for she felt herself one of them.  She, too, for all her occupation with social reform, was at core a thorough individualist, desiring far less the general good than her own attainment of celebrity as a public benefactress.  Nietzsche spoke to her instincts, as he does to those of a multitude of men and women, hungry for fame, avid of popular applause.  But she, like Lashmar, criticised her philosopher from a moral height.  She did not own to herself the intimacy of his appeal to her.

“He’ll do a great deal of harm in the world,” she said, this same afternoon, as Dyce and she drank tea together.  “The jingo impulse, and all sorts of forces making for animalism, will get strength from him, directly or indirectly.  It’s the negation of all we are working for, you and I.”

“Of course it is,” Dyce replied, in a voice of conviction.  “We have to fight against him.”  He added, after a pause, “There is a truth in him, of course; but it’s one of those truths which are dangerous to the generality of men.”