rise and fall of the white bosom.  And again he fed on purple ink.  So he began his next letter with “Dear Sophie.”  But he could not pour the same emotion into “Dear Sophie” as he could into “My Princess”—­and “My Sophie” was a step beyond the bounds of frank and loyal friendship.  So it came to his apostrophizing her as “Dear” and scattering “Sophies” deliciously through the text.  And so the frank and loyal friendship went on its appointed course, as every frank and loyal friendship between two young and ardent souls who love each other has proceeded since the beginning of a sophisticated world.

The first three months of that year were a period of enchantment.  He lived supremely.  The daily round of work was trivial play.  He rose at seven, went to bed at two, crowded the nineteen hours of wakefulness with glorious endeavour.  He went all over the country with his flambeau eveilleur, awakening the Youth of England, finding at last the great artistic gift the gods had given him, the gift of oratory.  One day he reminded Jane of a talk long ago when he had fled from the studios:  “You asked me how I was going to earn my living.  I said I was going to follow one of the Arts.”

“I remember,” said Jane, regarding him full-eyed.  “You said you thought you were a poet—­but you might be a musician or painter.  Finally you decided you were an actor.”

He laughed his gay laugh.  “I was an infernally bad actor,” he acknowledged.

Then he explained his failure on the stage.  He was impatient of other people’s inventions, wanting to play not Hamlet or Tom or Dick or Romeo or Harry, but himself.  Now he could play himself.  It was acting in a way.  Anyhow it was an Art; so his boyish prophecy had come true.  He had been struggling from childhood for a means of self-expression.  He had tried most of them save this.  Here he had found it.  He loved to play upon a crowd as if they were so many notes of a vast organ.

On this occasion Jane said:  “And my means of self-expression is to play on the keys of a typewriter.”

“Your time hasn’t come,” he replied.  “When you have found your means you will express yourself all the more greatly.”

Which was ingenious on the part of Paul, but ironically consoling to Jane.

One week-end during the session he spent at the Marchioness of Chudley’s place in Lancashire.  He drove in a luxurious automobile through the stately park, which once he had traversed in the brakeful of urchins, the raggedest of them all, and his heart swelled with pardonable exultation.  He had passed through Bludston and he had caught a glimpse of what had once been his brickfield, now the site of more rows of mean little houses, and he had seen the grim factory chimneys still smoking, smoking. . . .  The little Buttons, having grown up into big Buttons, were toiling away their lives in those factories.  And Button himself, the unspeakable Button?  Was he yet alive?  And Mrs. Button, who had been Polly Kegworthy and called herself his mother?  It was astonishing how seldom he thought of her. . . .  He had run away a scarecrow boy in a gipsy van.  He came back a formative force in the land, the lover of a princess, the honoured guest of the great palace of the countryside.  He slipped his hand into his waistcoat pocket and felt the cornelian heart.