her hands and thought of the peasants, of suffering, of her own beauty, of the inevitable compromise, and of how she would write it down.  Nor did Evan Williams say anything brutal, banal, or foolish when he shut his book and put it away to make room for the plates of soup which were now being placed before them.  Only his drooping bloodhound eyes and his heavy sallow cheeks expressed his melancholy tolerance, his conviction that though forced to live with circumspection and deliberation he could never possibly achieve any of those objects which, as he knew, are the only ones worth pursuing.  His consideration was flawless; his silence unbroken.

“Everything seems to mean so much,” said Sandra.  But with the sound of her own voice the spell was broken.  She forgot the peasants.  Only there remained with her a sense of her own beauty, and in front, luckily, there was a looking-glass.

“I am very beautiful,” she thought.

She shifted her hat slightly.  Her husband saw her looking in the glass; and agreed that beauty is important; it is an inheritance; one cannot ignore it.  But it is a barrier; it is in fact rather a bore.  So he drank his soup; and kept his eyes fixed upon the window.

“Quails,” said Mrs. Wentworth Williams languidly.  “And then goat, I suppose; and then...”

“Caramel custard presumably,” said her husband in the same cadence, with his toothpick out already.

She laid her spoon upon her plate, and her soup was taken away half finished.  Never did she do anything without dignity; for hers was the English type which is so Greek, save that villagers have touched their hats to it, the vicarage reveres it; and upper-gardeners and under-gardeners respectfully straighten their backs as she comes down the broad terrace on Sunday morning, dallying at the stone urns with the Prime Minister to pick a rose—­which, perhaps, she was trying to forget, as her eye wandered round the dining-room of the inn at Olympia, seeking the window where her book lay, where a few minutes ago she had discovered something—­something very profound it had been, about love and sadness and the peasants.

But it was Evan who sighed; not in despair nor indeed in rebellion.  But, being the most ambitious of men and temperamentally the most sluggish, he had accomplished nothing; had the political history of England at his finger-ends, and living much in company with Chatham, Pitt, Burke, and Charles James Fox could not help contrasting himself and his age with them and theirs.  “Yet there never was a time when great men are more needed,” he was in the habit of saying to himself, with a sigh.  Here he was picking his teeth in an inn at Olympia.  He had done.  But Sandra’s eyes wandered.

“Those pink melons are sure to be dangerous,” he said gloomily.  And as he spoke the door opened and in came a young man in a grey check suit.

“Beautiful but dangerous,” said Sandra, immediately talking to her husband in the presence of a third person. ("Ah, an English boy on tour,” she thought to herself.)