e Morton Plough Works, he was conscious of a certain
superiority in that he, at all events, had no hand in this paralysis
which was creeping on the country.

And getting more buff-colored every minute, he threaded his way on, till,
past the Marble Arch, he secured the elbow-room of Hyde Park. Here groups
of young men, with chivalrous idealism, were jeering at and chivying the
broken remnants of a suffrage meeting. Felix debated whether he should
oppose his body to their bodies, his tongue to theirs, or whether he
should avert his consciousness and hurry on; but, that instinct which
moved him to wear the gray top hat prevailing, he did neither, and stood
instead, looking at them in silent anger, which quickly provoked
endearments--such as: "Take it off," or "Keep it on," or "What cheer,
Toppy!" but nothing more acute. And he meditated: Culture! Could
culture ever make headway among the blind partisanships, the
hand-to-mouth mentality, the cheap excitements of this town life? The
faces of these youths, the tone of their voices, the very look of their
bowler hats, said: No! You could not culturalize the impermeable texture
of their vulgarity. And they were the coming manhood of the nation--this
inexpressibly distasteful lot of youths! The country had indeed got too
far away from 'the Land.' And this essential towny commonness was not
confined to the classes from which these youths were drawn. He had even
remarked it among his own son's school and college friends--an impatience
of discipline, an insensibility to everything but excitement and having a
good time, a permanent mental indigestion due to a permanent diet of
tit-bits. What aspiration they possessed seemed devoted to securing for
themselves the plums of official or industrial life. His boy Alan, even,
was infected, in spite of home influences and the atmosphere of art in
which he had been so sedulously soaked. He wished to enter his Uncle
Stanley's plough works, seeing in it a 'soft thing.'

But the last of the woman-baiters had passed by now, and, conscious that
he was really behind time, Felix hurried on. . . .

In his study--a pleasant room, if rather tidy--John Freeland was standing
before the fire smoking a pipe and looking thoughtfully at nothing. He
was, in fact, thinking, with that continuity characteristic of a man who
at fifty has won for himself a place of permanent importance in the Home
Office. Starting life in the Royal Engineers, he sti