's like the
supersession of the small holdings by the _latifundia_ in Italy. But
that's just where our great opportunity comes in. These synthetic phases
have occurred before in the world's history and their history is a
history of lost opportunities.... But need ours be?"

She had a feeling as though something had slipped through her fingers.

"I feel," she said, "that it is more important to me than anything else
in life, that these Hostels, anyhow, which are springing so rapidly from
a chance suggestion of mine, shouldn't be lost opportunities."

"Exactly," said Mr. Brumley, with the gesture of one who recovers a
thread. "That is just what I am driving at."

The fingers of his extended hand felt in the warm afternoon air for a
moment, and then he said "Ah!" in a tone of recovery while she waited
respectfully for the resumed thread.

"You see," he said, "I regard this process of synthesis, this
substitution of wholesale and collective methods for homely and
individual ones as, under existing conditions, inevitable--inevitable.
It's the phase we live in, it's to this we have to adapt ourselves. It
is as little under your control or mine as the movement of the sun
through the zodiac. Practically, that is. And what we have to do is not,
I think, to sigh for lost homes and the age of gold and spade husbandry,
and pigs and hens in the home, and so on, but to make this new synthetic
life tolerable for the mass of men and women, hopeful for the mass of
men and women, a thing developing and ascending. That's where your
Hostels come in, Lady Harman; that's where they're so important. They're
a pioneer movement. If they succeed--and things in Sir Isaac's hands
have a way of succeeding at any rate to the paying point--then there'll
be a headlong rush of imitations, imitating your good features,
imitating your bad features, deepening a groove.... You see my point?"

"Yes," she said. "It makes me--more afraid than ever."

"But hopeful," said Mr. Brumley, presuming to lay his hand for an
instant on her arm. "It's big enough to be inspiring."

"But I'm afraid," she said.

"It's laying down the lines of a new social life--no less. And what
makes it so strange, so typical, too, of the way social forces work
nowadays, is that your husband, who has all the instinctive insistence
upon every right and restriction of the family relation in his private
life, who is narrowly, passionately _for_ the home in his own case, who
hates a