sympathetic, rather diffident, speculative, moderately intelligent, with the rudiments perhaps of an imagination.  And he looked at the second man, who was sitting very upright, as if he had a particularly fine backbone, of which he was not a little proud.  He was extremely big and handsome, with pronounced and regular nose and chin, firm, well-cut lips beneath a smooth moustache, direct and rather insolent eyes, a some what receding forehead, and an air of mastery over all around.  It was obvious that he possessed a complete knowledge of his own mind, some brutality, much practical intelligence, great resolution, no imagination, and plenty of conceit.  And he looked at the woman.  She was pretty, but her face was vapid, and seemed to have no character at all.  And from one to the other he looked, and the more he looked the less resemblance he saw between them, till the objects of his scrutiny grew restive....  Then, ceasing to examine them, an idea came to him.  “No!  The Public is not this or that class, this or that type; the Public is an hypothetical average human being, endowed with average human qualities—­a distillation, in fact, of all the people in this hall, the people in the street outside, the people of this country everywhere.”  And for a moment he was pleased; but soon he began again to feel uneasy.  “Since,” he reflected, “it is necessary for me to supply this hypothetical average human being with what he wants, I shall have to find out how to distil him from all the ingredients around me.  Now how am I to do that?  It will certainly take me more than all my life to collect and boil the souls of all of them, which is necessary if I am to extract the genuine article, and I should then apparently have no time left to supply the precipitated spirit, when I had obtained it, with what it wanted!  Yet this hypothetical average human being must be found, or I must stay for ever haunted by the thought that I am not supplying him with what he wants!” And the writer became more and more discouraged, for to arrogate to himself knowledge of all the heights and depths, and even of all the virtues and vices, tastes and dislikes of all the people of the country, without having first obtained it, seemed to him to savour of insolence.  And still more did it appear impertinent, having taken this mass of knowledge which he had not got, to extract from it a golden mean man, in order to supply him with what he wanted.  And yet this was what every artist did who justified his existence—­or it would not have been so stated in a newspaper.  And he gaped up at the lofty ceiling, as if he might perchance see the Public flying up there in the faint bluish mist of smoke.  And suddenly he thought:  “Suppose, by some miracle, my golden-mean bird came flying to me with its beak open for the food with which it is my duty to supply it—­would it after all be such a very strange-looking creature; would it not be extremely like my normal self?  Am I not, in fact, myself the Public?  For,