Smith, scandalized, hustled him down the service stairs and out into the sunshine.

Real leisure is a blessing granted only to those who have definite working hours, and when Sunday morning dawned calm and bright, Charles awoke with the blissful taste of idleness on his tongue for what seemed the first time in his life. He had spent the entire week in unremitting work, for he felt justified in counting the afternoon’s visit to Scrodd as work, and even Saturday after­noon had seen him effecting some overdue repairs to his ‘cart’; reflecting as he did so that if he could only trace the present whereabouts of the first baby to be wheeled in that pram, he would present it to him for the use of his grandchildren.

So there he was, out among the idlers in the town’s one main street at half-past nine, with the day his own except for the six o’clock gathering for hymns and prayers which the Y.M.C.A. exacted, and quite rightly, as a form of spiritual rent. In other days the prospect of so many hours without formal employment would have filled him with a desire for companionship: but he now recognized this for what it was, the subterfuge of a mind unable to face the prospect of doing nothing: talking was a fake occupa­tion to soothe the confused brain in its dread of vacancy.

He thought, as he leaned on the parapet of the town’s bridge and watched the tiny brown river drifting beneath it, of all the expensive young men of the Thirties who had made, or wished to make, or talked of making, a gesture somewhat similar to his own, turning their backs on the setting that had pampered them; and how they had all failed from the start because their rejection was moved by the desire to enter, and be at one with, a vaguely conceived People, whose minds and lives they could not even begin to imagine, and who would in any case, had they ever arrived, have made their lives hell. At least, Charles thought with a sense of self-congratulation, he had always been right about them, right to despise them for their idiotic attempt to look through two telescopes as the same time: one fashioned of German psychology and pointed at themselves, the other of Rus­sian economics and directed at the English working class. A fundamental sense of what life really consisted of had saved him at any rate from such fatuities.