with two or three of the great unions, had filched the Clarion’s ground?  Or was it simply that, as Wharton put it to himself in moments of rage and despondency, the majority of working men “are either sots or block-heads, and will read and support nothing but the low racing or police-court news, which is all their intelligences deserve?” Few people had at the bottom of their souls a more scornful distrust of the “masses” than the man whose one ambition at the present moment was to be the accepted leader of English labour.

Finally, his private expenditure had always been luxurious; and he was liable, it will be seen, to a kind of debt that is not easily kept waiting.  On the whole, his bankers had behaved to him with great indulgence.

He fretted and fumed, turning over plan after plan as he walked, his curly head sunk in his shoulders, his hands behind his back.  Presently he stopped—­absently—­in front of the inner wall of the room, where, above a heavy rosewood bookcase, brought from his Lincolnshire house, a number of large framed photographs were hung close together.

His eye caught one and brightened.  With an impatient gesture, like that of a reckless boy, he flung his thoughts away from him.

“If ever the game becomes too tiresome here, why, the next steamer will take me out of it!  What a gorgeous time we had on that glacier!”

He stood looking at a splendid photograph of a glacier in the Thibetan Himalayas, where, in the year following his mother’s death, he had spent four months with an exploring party.  The plate had caught the very grain and glisten of the snow, the very sheen and tint of the ice.  He could feel the azure of the sky, the breath of the mountain wind.  The man seated on the ladder over that bottomless crevasse was himself.  And there were the guides, two from Chamounix, one from Grindelwald, and that fine young fellow, the son of the elder Chamounix guide, whom they had lost by a stone-shower on that nameless peak towering to the left of the glacier.  Ah, those had been years of life, those Wanderjahre!  He ran over the photographs with a kind of greed, his mind meanwhile losing itself in covetous memories of foamy seas, of long, low, tropical shores with their scattered palms, of superb rivers sweeping with sound and fury round innumerable islands, of great buildings ivory white amid the wealth of creepers which had pulled them into ruin, vacant now for ever of the voice of man, and ringed by untrodden forests.

“‘Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay,’” he thought.  “Ah! but how much did the man who wrote that know about Cathay?”

And with his hands thrust into his pockets, he stood lost awhile in a flying dream that defied civilisation and its cares.  How well, how indispensable to remember, that beyond these sweltering streets where we choke and swarm, Cathay stands always waiting! Somewhere, while we toil in the gloom and the crowd, there is air, there is sea, the joy of the sun, the life of the body, so good, so satisfying!  This interminable ethical or economical battle, these struggles selfish or altruistic, in which we shout ourselves hoarse to no purpose—­why! they could be shaken off at a moment’s notice!