She saw the London of the future. Not the vision popular just then: a soaring whirl of machinery in motion, of moving pavements and flying omnibuses; of screaming gramophones and standardized “homes”: a city where Electricity was King and man its soulless slave. But a city of peace, of restful spaces, of leisured men and women; a city of fine streets and pleasant houses, where each could live his own life, learning freedom, individuality; a city of noble schools; of workshops that should be worthy of labour, filled with light and air; smoke and filth driven from the land: science, no longer bound to commercialism, having discovered cleaner forces; a city of gay playgrounds where children should learn laughter; of leafy walks where the creatures of the wood and field should be as welcome guests helping to teach sympathy and kindliness: a city of music, of colour, of gladness. Beauty worshipped as religion; ugliness banished as a sin: no ugly slums, no ugly cruelty, no slatternly women and brutalized men, no ugly, sobbing children; no ugly vice flaunting in every highway its insult to humanity: a city clad in beauty as with a living garment where God should walk with man. “I know,” whispered Joan. “I’ve been there, too. I knew you were doing it, though I didn’t quite know how—till the other day. I wouldn’t think. I wanted to pretend that I didn’t. I know all you can say. I’ve been listening to it. It was right of you to want to give it all up to me for his sake. But it would be wrong of me to take it. I don’t quite see why. I can’t explain it. But I mustn’t. So you see it would be no good.”!

“What about the other people irritating us?” suggested Joan. “It was a foolish notion,” she said, “that of the Manchester school: that men and women could be treated as mere figures in a sum.”

It was hard not to. She wanted to tell him that he was all wrong—at least, so far as she was concerned. It. was not the conqueror she loved in him; it was the fighter. Not in the hour of triumph but in the hour of despair she would have yearned to put her arms about him. “Unpopularity, abuse, failure,” it was against the fear of such that she would have guarded him. Yes, she had dreamed of leadership, influence, command. But it was the leadership of the valiant few against the hosts of the oppressors that she claimed. Wealth, honours! Would she have given up a life of ease, shut herself off from society, if these had been her standards? “Mésalliance!” Had the male animal no instinct, telling it when it was loved with all a woman’s being, so that any other union would be her degradation. A passing cab had drawn up close to them. The chauffeur was lighting his pipe. Joan lay awake for a long while that night. The moon looked in at the window. It seemed to have got itself entangled in the tops of the tall pines. Would it not be her duty to come back—make her father happy, to say nothing of the other. He was a dear, sweet, lovable lad. Together, they might realize her father’s dream: repair the blunders, plant gardens where the weeds now grew, drive out the old sad ghosts with living voices. It had been a fine thought, a “King’s thought.” Others had followed, profiting by his mistakes. But might it not be carried further than even they had gone, shaped into some noble venture that should serve the future.