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His mind now shifted to that boldly-bland-eyed lady, probably awaiting him not far from Piccadilly—the absurdly mesquin and petty centre of this jellyfish of a city. As his taxi propelled itself into the broad street ending in Broadcasting House, his face wrinkled up as though he had been confronted with a peculiarly involved historical problem.

As he drew nearer to Essie her figure began to loom more insistently in his mind: at the same time his mind flashed back to the figures of Mr. and Mrs. Harding, père and mère, as life-long inhabitants of a handsome four-poster; for the nocturnal half of life Essie and he at night had beds that were twins. Same thing, same idea, but less oppressively barbarous. Why did he and Essie live together? Same idea. Nothing would have induced him to live with a man of Essie's disposition and mediocre intellect. For though smart enough, she had not a fraction of Mary's or of his mother's judgement. Their marriage had been a bus-accident. No offspring had resulted. A good thing. The male offspring would have resembled Essie more or less. Sex would have been unpleasantly prominent. Big staring eyes and all that. This was absurd. Human dignity would have been sacrificed to an exaggerated idea of size of population required. The piling up of huge populations immoral. Cannon-fodder. What nations wanted was smaller and smaller populations, not bigger and bigger. Quality not quantity. He gave a ghost of a ho-ho-ho. Here he was legislating for Overman. In the Yahooesque mass the nightly tête-à-tête between the sheets was one of the sole compensations for a life-sentence of hard labour. 'Je divague,' he muttered, as the cab stopped at the door of the 'Toulousaine'.