bly, while he went along, how very queer it was that with so
many plain people in the country, the population managed to keep up even
as well as it did. To his wonderfully keen sense of defect, it seemed
little short of marvellous. A shambling, shoddy crew, this crowd of
shoppers and labor demonstrators! A conglomeration of hopelessly
mediocre visages! What was to be done about it? Ah! what indeed!--since
they were evidently not aware of their own dismal mediocrity. Hardly a
beautiful or a vivid face, hardly a wicked one, never anything
transfigured, passionate, terrible, or grand. Nothing Greek, early
Italian, Elizabethan, not even beefy, beery, broad old Georgian.
Something clutched-in, and squashed-out about it all--on that collective
face something of the look of a man almost comfortably and warmly wrapped
round by a snake at the very beginning of its squeeze. It gave Felix
Freeland a sort of faint excitement and pleasure to notice this. For it
was his business to notice things, and embalm them afterward in ink. And
he believed that not many people noticed it, so that it contributed in
his mind to his own distinction, which was precious to him. Precious, and
encouraged to be so by the press, which--as he well knew--must print his
name several thousand times a year. And yet, as a man of culture and of
principle, how he despised that kind of fame, and theoretically believed
that a man's real distinction lay in his oblivion of the world's opinion,
particularly as expressed by that flighty creature, the Fourth Estate.
But here again, as in the matter of the gray top hat, he had
instinctively compromised, taking in press cuttings which described
himself and his works, while he never failed to describe those
descriptions--good, bad, and indifferent--as 'that stuff,' and their
writers as 'those fellows.'

Not that it was new to him to feel that the country was in a bad way. On
the contrary, it was his established belief, and one for which he was
prepared to furnish due and proper reasons. In the first place he traced
it to the horrible hold Industrialism had in the last hundred years laid
on the nation, draining the peasantry from 'the Land'; and in the second
place to the influence of a narrow and insidious Officialism, sapping the
independence of the People.

This was why, in going to a conclave with his brother John, high in
Government employ, and his brother Stanley, a captain of industry,
possessor of th