The lady handled the sugar-tongs thoughtfully. Her memory travelled back more than twenty years to a great ball in Grosvenor Square, and the timid son of the house, a gawky, awkward fellow with a reputation for shyness and brilliance. He could not dance, but under the palms in the conservatory, tête-à-tête, he could talk—as Rachel Solomons had never heard a man talk yet—of things she had never heard talked about: of a place called Toynbee Hall somewhere in the East End; of a little parson named Samuel Barnett; of the group of young University men—Alfred Milner, Arnold Toynbee, Lewis Nettleship—he and his wife were gathering about them there with the aim of bridging the gulf between Disraeli's Two Nations; of the hopes of a redeemed England and a new world that were rising in the hearts of many. That young man saw visions and had made her see them too. She had cut two dances to listen to that talk, and when at last an outraged partner had torn her away and Edward had said in his sensitive stuttering way, his face shining mysteriously,
"Shall we ever meet again?"
She had answered with astonishing emphasis,
"We must."
But they never did. Fate swung his scythe; her father died and she had to abandon her London season. Edward Caspar went abroad to study at Leipzig. And next winter she met her Hammer-man and launched her boat on the great waters.
But she had never forgotten that mysterious half-hour in which the trembling young man had knocked at her door, entered her sanctuary; and she, Rachel the reserved, had permitted him to stay.
At that moment Reality had entered her life—unforgettable and unforgotten.
India from the first tantalized Ernie. It was for him a mysterious and beautiful book, its pages for ever open inviting him to read, yet keeping its secret inviolate from him; for he could not read himself and there was no one to read to him. His officers, capable at their work, and good fellows enough in the main, Ernie soon discovered to be illiterate to an almost laughable degree. They not only knew nothing outside the limited military field, but they took a marked professional pride in their ignorance.
Ernie, used to his father's large philosophical outlook on any subject, his scholarly talk, his learning, was amazed at the intellectual apathy and crustacean self-complacency, sometimes ludicrous, more often naïf, occasionally offensive, of those set in authority over him.
Major Lewknor was the solitary exception. He was the one University man in the Regiment, and, whether as the result of a more catholic education or a more original temperament, he always stood slightly apart from his brother-officers. When he was a young man they had mocked at him quietly; now that he was a field officer they stood somewhat in awe of his ironical spirit. Some of his more dubious sayings were handed on religiously from last-joined subaltern to last-joined subaltern. The worst of them—his famous—Patriotism is the last refuge of every scoundrel—was happily attributed by the Army at large to a chap called Johnston who, thank God! was not a Hammer-man at all, but a Gunner or a Sapper or something like that. A Sapper probably. It was just the sort of thing you would expect a Sapper to say: for Sappers wore flannel shirts and never washed.