below. I become aware of the keen edge of the moon like a needle of
incandescent silver creeping over the crest, and suddenly the river
is alive with flashes.

He speaks, and astonishes me with the hidden course his thoughts
have taken.

"We two were boy and girl lovers like that," he says, and jerks a
head at the receding Utopians. "I loved her first, and I do not
think I have ever thought of loving anyone but her."

It is a curiously human thing, and, upon my honour, not one I had
designed, that when at last I stand in the twilight in the midst of
a Utopian township, when my whole being should be taken up with
speculative wonder, this man should be standing by my side, and
lugging my attention persistently towards himself, towards his
limited futile self. This thing perpetually happens to me, this
intrusion of something small and irrelevant and alive, upon my great
impressions. The time I first saw the Matterhorn, that Queen among
the Alpine summits, I was distracted beyond appreciation by the tale
of a man who could not eat sardines--always sardines did this with
him and that; and my first wanderings along the brown streets of
Pompeii, an experience I had anticipated with a strange intensity,
was shot with the most stupidly intelligent discourse on vehicular
tariffs in the chief capitals of Europe that it is possible to
imagine. And now this man, on my first night in Utopia, talks and
talks and talks of his poor little love affair.

It shapes itself as the most trite and feeble of tragedies, one of
those stories of effortless submission to chance and custom in which