His lost Idea drew close to him in sleep:  or he thought so, when awaking to the conception of a people solidified, rich and poor, by the common pride of simple manhood.  But it was not coloured, not a luminous globe:  and the people were in drab, not a shining army on the march to meet the Future.  It looked like a paragraph in a newspaper, upon which a Leading Article sits, dutifully arousing the fat worm of sarcastic humour under the ribs of cradled citizens, with an exposure of its excellent folly.  He would not have it laughed at; still he could not admit it as more than a skirt of the robe of his Idea.  For let none think him a mere City merchant, millionnaire, boon-fellow, or music-loving man of the world.  He had ideas to shoot across future Ages;—­provide against the shrinkage of our Coal-beds; against, and for, if you like, the thickening, jumbling, threatening excess of population in these Islands, in Europe, America, all over our habitable sphere.  Now that Mrs. Burman, on her way to bliss, was no longer the dungeon-cell for the man he would show himself to be, this name for successes, corporate nucleus of the enjoyments, this Victor Montgomery Radnor, intended impressing himself upon the world as a factory of ideas.  Colney’s insolent charge, that the English have no imagination—­a doomed race, if it be true!—­would be confuted.  For our English require but the lighted leadership to come into cohesion, and step ranked, and chant harmoniously the song of their benevolent aim.  And that astral head giving, as a commencement, example of the right use of riches, the nation is one, part of the riddle of the future solved.

Surely he had here the Idea?  He had it so warmly, that his bath-water heated.  Only the vision was wanted.

On London Bridge he had seen it—­a great thing done to the flash of brilliant results.  That was after a fall.

There had been a fall also of the scheme of Lakelands.

Come to us with no superstitious whispers of indications and significations in the fall!—­But there had certainly been a moral fall, fully to the level of the physical, in the maintaining of that scheme of Lakelands, now ruined by his incomprehensible Nesta—­who had saved him from falling further.  His bath-water chilled.  He jumped out and rubbed furiously with his towels and flesh-brushes, chasing the Idea for simple warmth, to have Something inside him, to feel just that sustainment; with the cry:  But no one can say I do not love my Nataly!  And he tested it to prove it by his readiness to die for her:  which is heroically easier than the devotedly living, and has a weight of evidence in our internal Courts for surpassing the latter tedious performance.