The lodgings he occupied were just like any other for which a man pays thirty shillings a week.  Though he had lived here for two or three years, there was very little to show that the rooms did not belong to some quite ordinary person; Dyce spent as little time at home as possible, and, always feeling that his abode in such poor quarters must be transitory, he never troubled himself to increase their comfort, or in any way to give character to his surroundings.  His library consisted only of some fifty volumes, for he had never felt himself able to purchase books; Mudie, and the shelves of his club, generally supplied him with all he needed.  The club, of course, was an indispensable luxury; it gave him a West-end address, enabled him to have a friend to lunch or dine in decent circumstances without undue expense, and supplied him with very good stationery for his correspondence.  Moreover, it pleasantly enlarged his acquaintance.  At the club he had got to know Lord Dymchurch, a month or two ago, and this connection he did not undervalue.  His fellow members, it is true, were not, for the most part, men of the kind with whom Dyce greatly cared to talk; as yet, they did not seem much impressed with his conversational powers; but Lord Dymchurch promised to be an exception, and of him Dyce had already a very high opinion.

After an hour or so of smoking and musing and mental vacillation, he sat down to write his letter.  “Dear Miss Connie,” he began.  It was the name by which he addressed Miss Bride in the old days, and it seemed good to him to preserve their former relations as far as possible; for Constance, though a strange sort of girl, nowadays decidedly cold and dry, undeniably had brains, and might still be capable of appreciating him.  “Yesterday I had to come back to town in a hurry, owing to the receipt of some disagreeable news, so of necessity I postponed my visit to Hollingford.  It occurs to me that I had better ask whether you were serious in your suggestion that Lady Ogram might be glad to make my acquaintance.  I know nothing whatever about her, except what you told me on our walk to the station, so cannot be sure whether she is likely to take any real interest in my ideas.  Our time together was too short for me to explain my stand-point; perhaps I had better say a word or two about it now.  I am a Socialist—­but not a Social-democrat; democracy (which, for the rest, has never existed) I look upon as an absurdity condemned by all the teachings of modern science.  I am a Socialist, for I believe that the principle of association is the only principle of progress.”

Here he paused, his pen suspended.  He was on the point of referring to the French book which he had read with so much profit of late, and which now lay on the table before him.  It might interest Constance; she might like to know of it.  He mused for some moments, dipped his pen, and wrote on.