same reason he remained unmarried; a penniless peer in the attitude
of wooing seemed to him ridiculous, and in much danger of becoming
contemptible. Loving the life of the country, studious, reserved, he
would have liked best of all to withdraw into some rustic hermitage,
and leave the world aside but this he looked upon as a temptation to
be resisted; there must be duties for him to discharge, if only he
could discover them. So he kept up his old acquaintances, and--
though rarely made new; he strove to interest himself in practical
things, if perchance his opportunity might meet him by the way; and
always he did his best to obtain an insight into the pressing
questions of the time. Though in truth of a very liberal mind, he
imagined himself a mass of prejudices; his Norman blood
(considerably diluted, it is true) sometimes appeared to him as a
hereditary taint, constituting an intellectual, perhaps a moral,
disability; in certain moods he felt hopelessly out of touch with
his age. To anyone who spoke confidently and hopefully concerning
human affairs, Lord Dymchurch gave willing attention. With Dyce
Lashmar he could not feel that he had much in common, but this
rather loquacious young man certainly possessed brains, and might
have an inkling of truths not easily arrived at. To-day, at all
events, Lashmar's talk seemed full of matter, and it was none the
less acceptable to Lord Dymchurch because of its anti-democratic
tenor.

"Not long ago," he remarked, quietly, "I was reading Marcus
Aurelius. You will remember that the idea of the community of human
interests runs through all his thought. He often insists that a man
is nothing apart from the society he belongs to, and that the common
good should be our first rule in conduct. When you were speaking
about individualism a sentence of his came into my mind. 'What is