their play. It was his fortune as a result of his position to know
persons who wore crowns and a natural incident in whose lives it
was to receive the homage expressed by the uncovering of the head
and the bending of the knee. At forty he looked back at the time
when the incongruousness, the abnormality and the unsteadiness of
the foundations on which such personages stood first struck him.
The realization had been in its almost sacrilegious novelty and
daring, a sort of thunderbolt passing through his mind. He had
at the time spoken of it only to one person.

"I have no moral or ethical views to offer," he had said. "I only
SEE. The thing--as it is--will disintegrate. I am so at sea as
to what will take its place that I feel as if the prospect were
rather horrible. One has had the old landmarks and been impressed
by the old pomp and picturesqueness so many centuries, that one
cannot see the earth without them. There have been kings even in
the Cannibal Islands."

As a statesman or a diplomat he would have seen far but he had been
too much occupied with Life as an entertainment, too self-indulgent
for work of any order. He freely admitted to himself that he was
a worthless person but the fact did not disturb him. Having been
born with a certain order of brain it observed and worked in spite
of him, thereby adding flavour and interest to existence. But that
was all.

It cannot be said that as the years passed he quite enjoyed the
fact that he knew he was rarely spoken of to a stranger without
its being mentioned that he was the most perfectly dressed man in
London. He rather detested the idea though he was aware that the