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“Twenty-five, I should imagine,” said Mrs, Viveash.

“Twenty-five? Good Lord, it’s nearly fifteen years since I was twenty-five. Fifteen years, fighting all the time. God, how I hate people sometimes! Everybody. It’s not their malignity I mind; I can give them back as good as they give me. It’s their pawer of silence and indifference, it’s their capacity for making themselves deaf. Here am I with some- thing to say to them, something important and essential. And I’ve been saying it for more than fifteen years, I’ve been shouting it. They pay no attention. I bring them my head and heart on a charger and they don’t even notice that the things are there. I sometimes wonder how much longer I can manage to go on.” His voice had become very low and it trembled. “One’s nearly forty, you know. . . .” The voice faded huskily away into silence. Languidly and as though the business exhausted him, he began mixing colours on his palette.

Mrs. Viveash looked at him. No, he wasn't young; at the moment, indeed, he seemed to have become much older than he really was. An old man was standing there, peaked and sharp and worn, He had failed, he was unhappy. But the world would have been unjuster, less discriminating if it had given him success,

“Some people believe in you,” she said; there was nothing else for her to say.

Lypiatt looked up at her. “You?” he asked,

Mrs, Viveash nodded, deliberately. It was a lie. But was it possible to tell the truth? “And then there is the future,” she reassured him, and her