The Disturbing Charm
clean-shaven modern Druid seeing visions. He did, at that moment, see a vision.

He saw an endless procession of those people who have loved or married (or both) the wrong person.

He saw the lads who have chosen out of their class; barmaids, "bits of fluff."

He saw the girls who have married out of their generation.

He saw the flirts, who wear an attachment as they wear a hat, tied for life to the affection that is true as steel. (Dreadful for both of them!)

Also the young men who treat Love as a cross between a meal and a music-hall joke, plighted to the shy idealists.

He saw the Bohemian married to the curate.

Likewise the attractive young rake, fettered to the frump.

He saw the women born for motherhood, left lonely spinsters for want of charm to attract.

He saw the mothers who sighed for freedom, resenting the nursery.

He saw the Anything, wedded to the Anything But.

Yes; he saw for that moment nothing but the wholesale gigantic Blunder of the mis-mating of the world.

No doubt it was all crystallized for him in one tender image; Olwen's dead mother, the girl he should have married. He sighed and smiled.

"Pity there's no putting things right, as that lunatic suggests," he thought. "There would be an invention worth boasting about! Wireless wouldn't be in it, or X-rays. Pity it isn't all true...."

A tap at the door interrupted his musings. The softest of girl's voices asked, "Are you ready for me, Uncle?"

"Yes!" he called out, jerking himself back into the world of realities. "Come in, Olwen."

Olwen Howel-Jones came in.

A small, but daintily made girl of nineteen. Just a handful of softness in a skimpy one-piece frock. A pale, three-cornered morsel of a face set off by sleek hair as black as her little French boots. Large eyes that seemed sometimes brown, sometimes grey; a mouth tremulous, but vivid as a red carnation—such was Olwen. She brought a ripple of 
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