THE WINDOWthe Tube is an eternal necessity. The thought wasdistasteful to him. He tossed his head. To avoid it,he would find some way of snubbing the predominanceof the arts. He would argue that the world exists forthe average human being; that the arts are merelya decoration imposed on the top of human life; theydo not express it. Nor is Shakespeare necessary to it.Not knowing precisely why it was that he wanted todisparage Shakespeare and come to the rescue of theman who stands eternally in the door of the lift, hepicked a leaf sharply from the hedge. All this wouldhave to be dished up for the young men at Cardiffnext month, he thought; here, on his terrace, he wasmerely foraging and picnicking (he threw away theleaf that he had picked so peevishly) like a man whoreaches from his horse to pick a bunch of roses, orstuffs his pockets with nuts as he ambles at his easethrough the lanes and fields of a country known tohim from boyhood. It was all familiar; this turning,that stile, that cut across the fields. Hours he wouldspend thus, with his pipe, of an evening, thinking upand down and in and out of the old familiar lanesand commons, which were all stuck about with thehistory of that campaign there, the life of this states-man here, with poems and with anecdotes, with fig-ures too, this thinker, that soldier; all very briskand clear; but at length the lane, the field, the com-mon, the fruitful nut-tree and the flowering hedgeled him on to that further turn of the road wherehe dismounted always, tied his horse to a tree, andproceeded on foot alone. He reached the edge of thelawn and looked out on the bay beneath.

It was his fate, his peculiarity, whether he wished53
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