WORLD'S END

The person he took into his confidence was Rick; and Rick said that people knew if they chose to know, but mostly they didn't. He said those conditions were as old as England. The politicians talked about remedying them, but when they got elected they thought about getting elected again. He said it was a problem of educating those slum people; of raising the tone of the intellectual and art life of the country. He took Lanny to a matinee of a play by Bernard Shaw which was the rage that season, and dealt with a flower girl who talked just the sort of Cockney that Lanny had heard during his descent into hell. A professor of phonetics succeeded in correcting her accent, making her into a regular lady of Mayfair. It was most amusing - and it seemed to be in line with Rick's suggestion.

Kurt Meissner arrived, and he, too, was taken into the discussion.

Said Kurt: "We don't leave our poor to the mercies of the wage market. The Germans are efficient, and provide decent housing for the workers, and insurance against sickness, old age, and unemployment." Kurt was perhaps a little too well satisfied with conditions in his country, and too contemptuous of British slackness. Rick, who was willing to make any number of sarcastic remarks about his native land, wasn't so pleased to hear them from a foreigner. Rick and Kurt didn't get along so well in London as they had in Hellerau.

Lanny talked about the question of poverty with his mother also, and Beauty assured him that the kind English people were not overlooking the problem. He would soon see proof of it; the twenty-fourth of June was known as "Alexandra Day," and the fashionable ladies of England honored their Queen Mother by putting on their daintiest white frocks and hats with many flowers and going out on the streets of the cities to sell artificial pink roses for the benefit of the overcrowded hospitals. Lanny.saw his mother, the loveliest sight in Piccadilly Circus, taking in silver coins hand over fist; he had to drive three times in one of Lord Eversham-Watson's cars to keep her supplied with stock in trade. He hoped that he might be able to provide accommodations for all those babies who were sleeping outdoors on benches.

₉

_{Green and Pleasant Land}

I

THE home of Sir Alfred Pomeroy-Nielson was called "The Reaches," and was close to the Thames River some way below Oxford. It was a very old place, and not much had been done to modernize it, because, as Rick explained, his father was too poor; they had all they could do to keep the place, and not much left for their beloved arts. There was a little bit of everything in the architecture of the house: an old tower, a peaked roof with gables, mul-lioned windows, a crenelated wall, a venerable archway through which you drove to the porte-cochere. The structures were jammed one against another, and topping them all were chimney pots, sometimes three or four in a row. This meant that all the year except summer the maidservants were busy carrying coal scuttles; and since there was very little running water, when they had finished with scuttles they carried pails.

But, of course, in summertime everybody went to the river, crossing a beautiful sloping lawn under an archway of aged oaks. It was a new kind of swimming for Lanny, and he thought he could never get enough of it. The boys lived in bathing suits, and "punted" in a long flat-bottomed boat with a ten-foot pole. It was a nice friendly little river, neither wide nor deep. Boathouses lined it, and gaily decorated motorboats went by, and long thin shells, with oarsmen practicing for the coming races. It was a holiday thoroughfare, and there was laughter and singing; the three musketeers of the arts sang all the songs they knew.

Rick had a sister, two years older than himself, and therefore too old for either of the visitors; but she had friends with younger sisters, so there was a troop of English girls bright-cheeked and jolly, interested in everything the boys were doing, and sharing their sports. Lanny was just at the age where he was preparing to discover that girls were wonderful, and here they were.