"Hm!" commented my new friend on what I felt to be a note of doubtful
agreement.

"You don't agree with that?" I asked.

"Well, I see what you're after, in a way," he acknowledged; "but it
doesn't seem to me that it amounts to very much--practically."

I was a trifle disappointed. I had not expected any insistence on the
practical from a man who could whistle Schubert and Shakespeare to the
dawn.

"Oh, practically! Perhaps not," I replied with a hint of contempt for
anything so common.

He gave a little self-conscious laugh. "You can't get away from the
practical in this life," he said. "Even in--" He seemed to bite off the
beginning of confidence with an effort. "You may dream half the night," he
began again, with a thin assumption of making an impersonal statement,
"but before the night's over you'll come up against the practical, or the
practicable, or the proper right thing, or something, that makes you see
what a fool you are. The way this world's run, you can't avoid it,
anyhow."

I knew that what he said was true, but I found it damping. It fitted all
too well with the coming realism of day. The contours of the landscape
were slowly resigning themselves to the formal attitudes imposed upon them
by expectation. The blood of colour was beginning to run weakly through
the monochrome. The nearer slopes of the hill and the leaves of the trees
were already professing a resolute green. Moment by moment the familiar