at all my flour! That's what will go first...."

The lady was a little flurried by Mr. Britling's too detailed
examination of her haul. "What good is blacking?" he asked. She would
not hear him. She felt he was trying to spoil her morning. She declared
she must get on back to her home. "Don't say I didn't warn you," she
said. "I've got no end of things to do. There's peas! I want to show
cook how to bottle our peas. For this year--it's lucky, we've got no end
of peas. I came by here just for the sake of telling you." And with that
she presently departed--obviously ruffled by Mrs. Britling's lethargy
and Mr. Britling's scepticism.

Mr. Britling watched her go off with a slowly rising indignation.

"And that," he said, "is how England is going to war! Scrambling for
food--at the very beginning."

"I suppose she is anxious for the children," said Mrs. Britling.

"Blacking!"

"After all," said Mr. Britling, "if other people are doing that sort of
thing--"

"That's the idea of all panics. We've got not to do it.... The country
hasn't even declared war yet! Hallo, here we are! Better late than
never."

The head of the postman, bearing newspapers and letters, appeared
gliding along the top of the hedge as he cycled down the road towards
the Dower House corner.

Section 3

England was not yet at war, but all the stars were marching to that end.
It was as if an event so vast must needs take its time to happen. No
doubt was left upon Mr. Britling's mind, though a whole-page
advertisement in the _Daily News_, in enormous type and of mysterious
origin, implored Great Britain not to play into the hands of Russia,
Russia the Terrible, that bugbear of the sentimental Radicals. The news
was wide and sweeping, and rather inaccurate. The Germans were said to
be in Belgium and Holland, and they had seized English ships in the Kiel
Canal. A moratorium had been proclaimed, and the reports of a food panic
showed Mrs. Faber to be merely one example of a large class of excitable
people.

Mr. Britling found the food panic disconcerting. It did not harmonise
with his leading _motif_ of the free people of the world rising against
the intolerable burthen of militarism. It spoilt his picture....

Mrs. Britling shared the paper with Mr. Britling, they stood by the bed
of begonias near the cedar tree and read, and the air was full of the
cheerful activities of the lawn-mower that was being drawn by a
carefully booted horse across t