minority of English people realise how extensively this ostensible order
has even now passed away. The great houses stand in the parks still,
the cottages cluster respectfully on their borders, touching their eaves
with their creepers, the English countryside--you can range through Kent
from Bladesover northward and see persists obstinately in looking what
it was. It is like an early day in a fine October. The hand of change
rests on it all, unfelt, unseen; resting for awhile, as it were half
reluctantly, before it grips and ends the thing for ever. One frost and
the whole face of things will be bare, links snap, patience end, our
fine foliage of pretences lie glowing in the mire.

For that we have still to wait a little while. The new order may have
gone far towards shaping itself, but just as in that sort of lantern
show that used to be known in the village as the "Dissolving Views," the
scene that is going remains upon the mind, traceable and evident, and
the newer picture is yet enigmatical long after the lines that are to
replace those former ones have grown bright and strong, so that the new
England of our children's children is still a riddle to me. The ideas
of democracy, of equality, and above all of promiscuous fraternity have
certainly never really entered into the English mind. But what IS coming
into it? All this book, I hope, will bear a little on that. Our people
never formulates; it keeps words for jests and ironies. In the meanwhile
the old shapes, the old attitudes remain, subtly changed and changing
still, sheltering strange tenants. Bladesover House is now let furnished
to Sir Reuben Lichtenstein, and has been since old Lady Drew died; it
was my odd experience to visit there, in the house of which my mother
had been housekeeper, when my uncle was at the climax of Tono-Bungay.
It was curious to notice then the little differences that had come to
things with this substitution. To borrow an image from my
mineralogical days, these Jews were not so much a new British gentry as
"pseudomorphous" after the gentry. They are a very clever people, the
Jews, but not clever enough to suppress their cleverness. I wished I
could have gone downstairs to savour the tone of the pantry. It would
have been very different I know. Hawksnest, over beyond, I noted, had
its pseudomorph too; a newspaper proprietor of the type that hustles
along with stolen ideas from one loud sink-or-swim enterprise to
another, had bought the