Nothing sacred to them! He shouldn't be surprised if they began to break
windows. In Pall Mall, past those august dwellings, to enter which
people paid sixty pounds, this shrieking, whistling, dancing dervish of a
crowd was swarming. From the Club windows his own kind were looking out
on them with regulated amusement. They didn't realise! Why, this was
serious--might come to anything! The crowd was cheerful, but some day
they would come in different mood! He remembered there had been a mob in
the late eighties, when he was at Brighton; they had smashed things and
made speeches. But more than dread, he felt a deep surprise. They were
hysterical--it wasn't English! And all about the relief of a little
town as big as--Watford, six thousand miles away. Restraint, reserve!
Those qualities to him more dear almost than life, those indispensable
attributes of property and culture, where were they? It wasn't English!
No, it wasn't English! So Soames brooded, threading his way on. It was
as if he had suddenly caught sight of someone cutting the covenant 'for
quiet possession' out of his legal documents; or of a monster lurking and
stalking out in the future, casting its shadow before. Their want of
stolidity, their want of reverence! It was like discovering that
nine-tenths of the people of England were foreigners. And if that were
so--then, anything might happen!

At Hyde Park Corner he ran into George Forsyte, very sunburnt from
racing, holding a false nose in his hand.

"Hallo, Soames!" he said, "have a nose!"

Soames responded with a pale smile.

"Got this from one of these sportsmen," went on George, who had evidently
been dining; "had to lay him out--for trying to bash my hat. I say, one
of these days we shall have to fight these chaps, they're getting so
damned cheeky--all radicals and socialists. They want our goods. You
tell Uncle James that, it'll make him sleep."

'In vino veritas,' thought Soames, but he only nodded, and passed on up
Hamilton Place. There was but a trickle of roysterers in Park Lane, not
very noisy. And looking up at the houses he thought: 'After all, we're
the backbone of the country. They won't upset us easily. Possession's
nine points of the law.'

But, as he closed the door of his father's house behind him, all that
queer outlandish nightmare in the streets passed out of his mind almost
as completely as if, having dreamed it, he had awakened in the warm clean
morning