should be richer by these two romping boys in red jerseys! It was all so mechanical.

"Are these all?" Rudd asked.

"Oh no," she said. "There's Winnie, she's at school at Eastbourne. Couldn't you come and see us?" she added. "My husband would be so glad to meet you. You must remember him-Harold Beames."

Harold Beames. Rudd remembered the little beast. Fancy a nice girl like Violet marrying Harold Beames and having three children! What a world!

He excused himself and passed on. But the thought of the little tugging boys in the jerseys remained with him.

He passed the Town Hall and remembered the lecture on astronomy. He walked out to his grandfather's house, and it had gone and a new road was cut through the place where it stood. A wagon was passing right through the beautiful garden, where once were grass and croquet hoops and geraniums and lobelias, and fat yellow and brown calceolarias which you pinched between your fingers. Change truly was the law of life: hurrying, thoughtless, foolish, ruthless mutability.

His uncle Hector, who had retired from the governorship of the gaol, asked him when he was going to marry. In fact, that was a question of which he had been conscious on all sides, spoken and unspoken. Why should every one marry?

"Ah!" he had said lightly, "when the Fairy Princess comes my way."

"Don't put it off too long," said Uncle Hector. "It's time you settled down."

That insufferable phrase. Why was there this conspiracy to abbreviate irresponsibility? It seemed that no one in this world could be really happy so long as one living soul remained unsettled down.

With what relief he had taken his seat in the railway carriage on the way back to London, leaving Caston behind. Not that he was not fond of them all. He was, and he liked to revive old memories. But he could not breathe. London was the place. London was the centre. In London you could have impulses and gratify them; in short, live.

That night Rudd woke at 3.30 a.m. with his mind full of his Caston experiences. He had been remembering them in his sleep rather than dreaming. And in a flash the realization came to him that he who was such a foe to crystallization was crystallizing too. The experimental stage of life, in which he had always unthinkingly placed himself, which was to end at any moment that he might select and turn into the real career, suddenly showed itself in its own true colours as routine too.

He, the free, the amateur, the cultivator of amusing impulse he also was in the machine! In short, what he thought was only the curtain-riser was really the play.

He lay awake in a panic. He too was in the trap.

R

CHAPTER XXXVI

RUDD IS LAUNCHED

UDD, as usual, took his depression to Uncle
Ben.

"Come to Fort's and dine and we'll talk it over," said Uncle Ben.

Uncle Ben hated foreign cooking and disliked clubs, and Fort's had become his headquarters. It was a chop-house of the old type, with high-backed recesses to hold four, and a great open fire. Also there were no women. Fort's prided itself on this exclusion of triflers, on its beef, on its old ale, and on the extreme deliberation of its processes. It was quite a simple matter to have to wait twenty minutes for a plate of cold meat. Strangers resenting this fumed and went away, vowing never to return; which was precisely what Fort's wanted. Meanwhile the old customers looked on with amused expressions, or, buried in the illustrated papers, disregarded the disturbance.

No dentist or physician took in so many illustrated papers as Fort's; and it transcended Harley Street in its lavishness in the matter of Punch, for it provided two copies.

How Fort's kept enough prosperity to continue, no one could understand, for when it was full it could hold no more than thirty, and every one sat so long that relays of customers were difficult, and no one ever drank the sparkling wine on the profit of which so many restaurants chiefly live.

Fort's had two waiters only, Mark and James, and they had been there since the beginning of time. Both were wealthy old men. Mark owned a row of houses in Bermondsey; James had a small eatinghouse of his own in Southwark. Each was, if possible, a slower waiter than the other, and had either of them taken the place of the tortoise in the famous race with the hare nothing could have prevented the hare's victory. None the less, Uncle Ben, who was impetuous enough in most ways, clung to Fort's; although a stranger hearing the things that he would say to Mark and James concerning their origin, their personal unsightliness, their incorrigible depravity, and the debased quality of the food and drink which they reluctantly distributed, would have marvelled that he was there at all.

Yet he was there, every day, and such, to the initiated, was the endearing nature of his abuse, that he was also Mark and James' special favourite. It was, as a matter of fact, he who had arranged for Mark's son to become articled to an architect, and for James's son to be set on the road towards the highest goal in life in the Jacobean eye, chartered accountancy.

"Why I should do so much for so hopeless a villain

as you are, James, I don't know," he had said, and had done it.

Such was Fort's, and here were Rudd and Uncle Ben on the memorable evening when Uncle Ben suddenly remarked, "There must be no more nonsense. You must write a book."

"I wish I could," said Rudd.

"Of course you can," said Uncle Ben. "You are writing all the time, aren't you? Very well then. You can write a book."

Rudd pointed out what a difference there was between a brief journalistic effort and a long sustained novel.

"I didn't say a novel," said Uncle Ben. "I said a book. A novel, if you like, but not necessarily."

"Every novel I read," said Rudd, "fills me first with a desire to write one like it, or better, and then with despair that I never could."

"And I hope you never will," said Uncle Ben. "What is the use of writing a book like any other book? The way to write a book-the one I want you to write-is to forget that other authors exist. Now, I've got a proposal to make. I want a book written and I am prepared to pay you for writing it. But of course it will be your property."

Rudd could not believe his ears.

"It is the kind of book which a journalist can write better than anyone else," said Uncle Ben: "detached episodes that combine. I want it to consist of a series of studies of the old-book shops of London and of