ireck. Mr. Britling was one of a large but still remarkable class of
people who seem at the mere approach of photography to change their
hair, their clothes, their moral natures. No photographer had ever
caught a hint of his essential Britlingness and bristlingness. Only the
camera could ever induce Mr. Britling to brush his hair, and for the
camera alone did he reserve that expression of submissive martyrdom Mr.
Direck knew. And Mr. Direck was altogether unprepared for a certain
casualness of costume that sometimes overtook Mr. Britling. He was
wearing now a very old blue flannel blazer, no hat, and a pair of
knickerbockers, not tweed breeches but tweed knickerbockers of a
remarkable bagginess, and made of one of those virtuous socialistic
homespun tweeds that drag out into woolly knots and strings wherever
there is attrition. His stockings were worsted and wrinkled, and on his
feet were those extraordinary slippers of bright-coloured bast-like
interwoven material one buys in the north of France. These were purple
with a touch of green. He had, in fact, thought of the necessity of
meeting Mr. Direck at the station at the very last moment, and had come
away from his study in the clothes that had happened to him when he got
up. His face wore the amiable expression of a wire-haired terrier
disposed to be friendly, and it struck Mr. Direck that for a man of his
real intellectual distinction Mr. Britling was unusually short.

For there can be no denying that Mr. Britling was, in a sense,
distinguished. The hero and subject of this novel was at its very
beginning a distinguished man. He was in the _Who's Who_ of two
continents. In the last few years he had grown with some rapidity into a
writer recognised and welcomed by the more cultivated sections of the
American public, and even known to a select circle of British readers.
To his American discoverers he had first appeared as an essayist, a
serious essayist who wrote about aesthetics and Oriental thought and
national character and poets and painting. He had come through America
some years ago as one of those Kahn scholars, those promising writers
and intelligent men endowed by Auguste Kahn of Paris, who go about the
world nowadays in comfort and consideration as the travelling guests of
that original philanthropist--to acquire the international spirit.
Previously he had been a critic of art and literature and a writer of
thoughtful third leaders in the London _Times_. He ha