“You’ve got hold of a very serviceable weapon,” he said, stretching his legs before him, and clasping his hands behind his head.  “I, for one, would gladly be convinced against individualism.  I’m afraid it’s my natural point of view, and I’ve been trying for a long time to get rid of that old Adam.  Go on with your idea about the organisation of society.  What ultimate form do you suppose nature to be aiming at?”

Dyce seemed to reflect for a moment.  He asked himself, in fact, whether Lord Dymchurch was at all likely to come upon that French work which, pretty certainly, he had not yet read.  The probability seemed slight.  In any case, cannot a theory be originated independently by two minds?

His eye lighting up with the joy of clear demonstration—­to Dyce it was a veritable joy, his narrow, but acute, mind ever tending to sharp-cut system—­he displayed the bio-sociological theory in its whole scope.  More than interested, and not a little surprised, Lord Dymchurch followed carefully from point to point, now and then approving with smile or nod.  At the end, he was leaning forward, his hands grasping his ankles, and his head nearly between his knees; and so he remained for a minute when Dyce had ceased.

“I like that!” he exclaimed at length, the smile of boyish pleasure sunny upon his face.  “There’s something satisfying about it.  It sounds helpful.”

Help amid the confusing problems of life was what Lord Dymchurch continually sought.  In his private relations one of the most blameless of men, he bore about with him a troubled conscience, for he felt that he was living to himself alone, whereas, as a man, and still more as member of a privileged order, he should have been justifying his existence and his position by some useful effort.  At three and twenty he had succeeded to the title—­and to very little else; the family had long been in decline; a Lord Dymchurch who died in the early part of the nineteenth century practically completed the ruin of his house by an attempt to form a Utopia in Canada, and since then a rapid succession of ineffectual peers, fruges consumere nati, had steadily reduced the dignity of the name.  The present lord—­Walter Erwin de Gournay Fallowfield—­found himself inheritor of one small farm in the county of Kent, and of funded capital which produced less than a thousand a year; his ancestral possessions had passed into other hands, and, excepting the Kentish farm-house, Lord Dymchurch had not even a dwelling he could call his own.  Two sisters were his surviving kin; their portions being barely sufficient to keep them alive, he applied to their use a great part of his own income; unmarried, and little likely to change their condition, these ladies lived together, very quietly, at a country house in Somerset, where their brother spent some months of every year with them.  For himself, he had rooms at Highgate Grove, not unpleasant lodgings in a picturesque old house, where he kept the books which were indispensable to him, and a few pictures which he had loved from boyhood.  All else that remained from the slow Dymchurch wreck was down in Somerset.