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Lord Horatio too had not slept well that night, although he had occupied Lady Garbees' pet visitors' bedroom.

He was in a state of unusual discontent with himself. He was asking himself whether he had not missed his way in life altogether.

Bonina (Lady Garbees) had almost said as much. "I hated this evening. Never have I felt before how uncongenial this English atmosphere can be to all we are and all we care for. On that platform, standing up before that dismal crowd of C 3 clerks and errand boys, I pitied you. I pitied myself. You may be English through and through, but all the same, you are alien here. You would be alien in any of these dismal democratic countries. You are—arbitrary, my dear. You are like one of those great Florentine princes. You are a born grandee. I don't say that to flatter you. I don't flatter you. You know it's the truth as well as I do."

"Ye–e–s," he said, wanting more of it. "For some time I have been feeling—out of touch."

"We American aristocrats feel the same thing." (She was American born.)

"It is the mean, puritanical, English tradition. Always—politics without a shred of dignity. Over there in spite of everything—it clings to us still. New England has always been just England and a little more so, but we down in the south went back to the sun and to power over our fellow–creatures. In England political life always has been squalid. How Shakespeare felt that! How his contempt breaks out against the many–headed monster and its 'stinking greasy caps! 'Musty superfluity.' That was his name for democracy. I was reading Coriolanus yesterday. Shakespeare would have been with you up to the hilt, the dagger's hilt…

"English people are naturally common in grain…Lucy and I when we went to Biskra—A sort of splendour about the Arabs. Nature's noblemen. You could meet the hall porter on equal terms. This English temperament! It is like the mild, mild, old and mild climate. Never really hot, never really cold. Sunshine like genteel compliments and rain like sentimental tears. It's all one with the soft, mawkish scenery. Trimmed trees; polite fields; snug little cottages, hawthorns and primroses. Snug's the word. No mountains, no snows, no stupendous gorges, no guts in it, Horry, no guts!"

Bonina's purpose may have been to console him for the particular flatness of the great Birthday Meeting in the smaller Saltbag Hall, but her words carried further than that. It was breaking in upon his proud, reluctant intelligence that for—how long was it now?—fifteen years he had been wasting his great gifts and all the potentialities of his vitality upon a community incapable of appreciation, a facetious population, a population capable of nothing but an oafish stare or a derisive grin, too stupid even to bow before wrath and scorn. All that could be done had been done to make these dull mechanic souls walk with a prouder step behind a natural leader. He had sold them purple shirts at 40 per cent below cost. He had drilled them, had them lectured to, sought speakers who could be trained to inspire them. He had been to Germany, he had been to Italy, again and again, to study leadership, to mark the methods of evoking the generous youth and strength and imagination of those nobler peoples. You can make ordinary Germans and Italians out of the streets crow like cocks, strut like peacocks and salute like gladiators about to die. "Serried ranks" are where they are most at home. But these English! They love to be out of step. At some expense he had hired clever literary fellows to write him a song book, and clever musical fellows to adapt notoriously successful tunes to the purposes of the movement. Think of the gusto with which a German crowd would have let out that Birthday Hymn:

"England awake, salute the Happy Morn On which our Movement and our Boss were born."

You would have expected that to stir these urban clowns and open their eyes to what they might be. And then again:

"Onward Bohun's soldiers, marching as to War, With the Jews and Bolsheviks scampering before."

It was a trumpet–call! But for all the result it got it might have been a bray.

He had given those boys a gymnasium, he had given them a recreation–room, he had sold them balls, badges, rackets, tents, camping outfits, knuckle–dusters and sheath–knives at half cost or less…

And they could not even keep in tune! You might think they were ashamed of the song.

He had made his speech, his usual speech, to a scanty audience, too thick–headed to realise that now he was no longer making that speech with his former pleading, winning conviction, but in a spirit of contemptuous irony.

The subtle change in his intonation had been completely lost upon them…

After he had left Bonina in the small hours he had slept for a time and then grown wakeful again. His mind passed through a series of alternations between uneasy dreaming and dreamy wakefulness, in which the one continuing idea was his complete failure to grip the popular imagination or realise himself in these political activities upon which he had launched himself so hopefully and so rashly.

It had been going on for fifteen years. Fifteen years of leadership—with practically nobody falling in behind. His friends laughed at him. A lot of young fools in the West End were making a joke of the Popular Socialist salute. They did it to him in fashionable restaurants where politics should have a rest; they did it at race meetings in enclosures and places where he did not want it done, where he was ready to waive it and be just a gentleman among gentlemen. Things had come to that. A joke. And this was his forty–fifth birthday.

He was bored. He had to admit to himself that he was bored by the whole Popular Socialist movement. Bonina had been very near the truth of the business in their long and penetrating talk, very near indeed. That woman had fire in her imagination. She had a way of illuminating reality with strangely coloured lights. She had cruelty in her nature and she was not ashamed. She liked things to hurt. She wanted to hurt and be hurt. She bit. She had left her mark. She was all for lovers biting—hard. She wanted an intensity in life that ordinary everyday living did not give.

How wise she was! Everyone had queer impulses, she insisted, but the common sort, the "Tag," as Coriolanus put it, suppressed them. The essence of aristocracy was the ruthless refusal to suppress oneself. How had she put it? She wanted to wring life. That put exactly what he had always wanted to do. Once or twice he had wrung life a bit; when they expelled him from Eton and during his cadet days, when the chaps chased and hazed him for tying up young Darlington. After that he had been almost criminally subservient to the mild appearances of an essentially middle–class society. He had sinned against his own rich nature. Could there be anything better in the whole of being than having one's grip on a weakly, resisting, overpowered, living creature, and doing one's will, exhausting the grossest fantasy, upon that panting life? All the noble carnivores exist for that, and are they not the lords of creation?

He found himself wide awake in a sadistic reverie. He had a pleasing idea of going back to Bonina and strangling her…

One never knew. She might object and make a row and bring in the servants. She was capable of the greatest inconsistency. Her talk was wilder than her spirit. Perhaps she had just been posing at him. After all—she was American.

He dozed and then woke into the problem of getting away from Popular Socialism. In any other country in the world it would have given him ample scope for terrorism, physical intimidation, lurid events. As it was, except for one little bit of discipline—And there even he had been weak.

He had feared blackmail.

"Ruthlessness," he muttered. "Strange lusts…Quivering flesh…The Tiger is an aristocrat…Nietzsche…Strength…Bleating multitude…Bleating fools…All of them out of tune."

He sank down again into oblivion.