“And I suppose you don’t envy him?”

“I don’t,” said Alpha.

“Well,” I ventured, “let me offer you a piece of advice.  Never travel in the same train with Mr. Omega.”

“Never travel in the same train with him?  Why not?”

“Because if there were a railway accident, and you were both killed on the spot, the world might draw comparisons between the effect on your family and the effect on his, and your family wouldn’t like it.”

We remained silent for a space, and the silence was dramatic. 
Nervously, I looked out of the window.

At length Alpha said: 

“I suppose there is such a thing as the happy medium.”

“Good-bye, Alpha.”  I rose abruptly.  “Sorry, but I’ve got to go at once.”

And I judiciously departed.

IV — IN HER PLACE

I

The plain man is not always mature and successful, as I have hitherto regarded him.  He may be unsuccessful in a worldly sense; but from my present point of view I do not much care whether he is unsuccessful in that sense.  I know that plain men are seldom failures; their very plainness saves them from the alarming picturesqueness of the abject failure.  On the other hand, I care greatly whether the plain man is mature or immature, old or young.  I should prefer to catch him young.  But he is difficult to catch young.  The fact is that, just as he is seldom a failure, so he is seldom young.  He becomes plain only with years.  In youth, even in the thirties, he has fanciful capricious qualities which prevent him from being classed with the average sagacious plain man.  He slowly loses these inconvenient qualities, and develops into part of the backbone of the nation.  And then it is too late to tell him that he is not perfect, simply because he has forgotten to cultivate the master quality of all qualities—­namely, imagination.  For imagination must be cultivated early, and it is just the quality that these admirable plain men lack.

By imagination I mean the power to conceive oneself in a situation which one is not actually in; for instance, in another person’s place.  It is among the sardonic humours of destiny that imagination, while positively dangerous in an ill-balanced mind and of the highest value in a well-balanced mind, is to be found rather in the former than in the latter.  And anyhow, the quality is rare in Anglo-Saxon races, which are indeed both afraid and ashamed of it.

And yet could the plain, the well-balanced Anglo-Saxon male acquire it, what a grand world we should live in!  The most important thing in the world would be transformed.  The most important thing in the world is, ultimately, married life, and the chief practical use of the quality of imagination is to ameliorate married life.  But who in England or America (or elsewhere) thinks of it in that connection?