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He and Teresa exchanged friendly nods, and she, sinking into a chair, began to contemplate him—much as Blake may have contemplated the tiger, when he wondered:

What mysterious hand and eye

Framed its awful symmetry.

There he sat, pink from his bath, pleasantly tired after his two rounds of golf, expounding to Jollypot his views on the threatened strike—the heir to all the ages.

For his body and soul were knit from strange old fragments: sack; fear of the plague; terror of the stars; a vision of the Virgin Queen borne, like a relic in a casket, on the shoulders of fantastically-dressed gentlemen; Walsingham; sailor’s tales of Spanish ladies; a very English association between the august word of Liberty and the homely monosyllable Wilkes; dynasties tottering to the tune of “Lillybolero”; Faith, Hope, and Charity, stimulated by cries of, “No Popery,” “Lavender, Sweet Lavender,” “Pity the poor prisoners of the Fleet”; Dr. Donne thundering Redemption at Paul’s Cross, the lawn at his wrist curiously edged with a bracelet of burnished hair; Hector of Troy, Alexander the Great, Pride, Lechery, Robin Hood, throbbing in ballads, or else, alive and kicking and bravely dressed beyond one’s dreams, floating in barges down the Thames; Death—grinning in stone from crevices of the churches, dancing in churchyards with bishops and kings and courtesans, forming the burden of a hundred songs, and at last, one day, catching one oneself; Death—but every death cancelled by a birth.