'No, they are too necessary.'

'To you and me. Not to the brawlers in Hyde Park. The life of civilized beings is a very complex thing. It isn't filled by good intentions nor even by the cardinal virtues. The function of the older societies is to hand on the best things the world has won, so that those who come after, instead of having to go back to barbarism, may start from where the best of their day left off. We do for manners and the arts in general what the Moors did for learning when the wild hordes came down. There were capital chaps among the barbarians,' he smiled, 'I haven't a doubt! But it was the men who held fast to civilization's clue, they were the people who mattered. We matter. We hold the clue.' He was recovering his spirits. 'Your friends want to open the gates still wider to the Huns. You want even the Moors overwhelmed.'

'Many women are as jealous to guard the old gains as the men are. Wait!' She leaned forward. 'I begin to see! They are more keen about it than the mass of men. The women! They are civilization's only ally against your brother, the Goth.'

He laughed. 'When you are as absurd as that, my dear, I don't mind. No, not a little bit. And I really believe I'm too fond of you to quarrel on any ground.'

'You don't care enough about anything to quarrel about it,' she said, smiling, too. 'But it's just as well'—she rose and began to draw on her glove—'just as well that each of us should know where to find the other. So tell me, what if it should be a question of going forward in the suffrage direction or going back?'

'You mean——'

'——on from latchkeys and University degrees to Parliament, or back.'

'Oh, back,' he said hastily. 'Back. Yes, back to the harem.'

When the words were out, Lord Borrodaile had laughed a little uneasily—like one who has surprised even himself by some too-illuminating avowal. 'See here,' he put out a hand. 'I'm not going to let you go for a minute or two. I've brought something to show you. This foolish discussion put it out of my head.' But the revealing word he had flung out—it seemed to have struck wide some window that had been shuttered close before. The woman stood there in the glare. She did not refuse to be drawn back to her place on the sofa, but she looked round first to see if the others had heard and how they took it. A glimpse of Mrs. Freddy's gown showed her out of earshot on the balcony.

'I've got something here really rather wonderful,' Lord Borrodaile went on, with that infrequent kindling of enthusiasm. He had taken one of the unmounted photographs from between its two bits of cardboard and was holding it up before his eyeglass. 'Yes, he's an extraordinary beggar!'—which remark in the ears of those who knew his lordship, advertized his admiration of either some man of genius or 'Uebermensch' of sorts. Before he shared the picture with his companion he told her of what was not then so widely known—details of that most thrilling moment perhaps in all the romance of archæology—where the excavators of Knossos came upon the first authentic picture of a man belonging to that mysterious and forgotten race that had raised up a civilization in some things rivalling the Greek—a race that had watched Minoan power wane and die, and all but the dimmest legend of it vanish, before the builders of Argos and Mycenæ began laying their foundation stones. Borrodaile, with an accent that for him was almost emotion, emphasized the strangeness to the scholar of having to abandon the old idea of the Greek being the sole flower of Mediterranean civilization. For here was this wonderful island folk—a people standing between and bridging East and West—these Cretan men and women who, though they show us their faces, their delicate art and their stupendous palaces, have held no parley with the sons of men, some say for three and thirty centuries. 'But wait! They'll tell us tales before those fellows have done! I wouldn't mind hearing what this beggar has to say for himself!' At last he shared the picture. They agreed that he was a beggar to be reckoned with—this proud athlete coming back to the world of men after his long sleep, not blinded by the new day, not primitive, apologetic, but meeting us with a high imperial mien, daring and beautiful.