e present shock might not send it smashing down.... And then all the
little life we had lived so far would roll away....

Mrs. Britling, he noted, glanced ever and again at her sunlit
house--there were new sunblinds, and she had been happy in her choice of
a colour--and listened with a sceptical expression to this
disquisition.

"A few days ago," said Mr. Britling, trying to make things concrete for
her, "you and I together were worth five-and-twenty thousand pounds. Now
we don't know what we are worth; whether we have lost a thousand or ten
thousand...."

He examined his sovereign purse and announced he had six pounds. "What
have you?"

She had about eighteen pounds in the house.

"We may have to get along with that for an indefinite time."

"But the bank will open again presently," she said. "And people about
here trust us."

"Suppose they don't?"

She did not trouble about the hypothesis. "And our investments will
recover. They always do recover."

"Everything may recover," he admitted. "But also nothing may recover.
All this life of ours which has seemed so settled and secure--isn't
secure. I have felt that we were fixed here and rooted--for all our
lives. Suppose presently things sweep us out of it? It's a possibility
we may have to face. I feel this morning as if two enormous gates had
opened in our lives, like the gates that give upon an arena, gates
giving on a darkness--through which anything might come. Even death.
Suppose suddenly we were to see one of those great Zeppelins in the air,
or hear the thunder of guns away towards the coast. And if a messenger
came upon a bicycle telling us to leave everything and go inland...."

"I see no reason why one should go out to meet things like that."

"But there is no reason why one should not envisage them...."

"The curious thing," said Mr. Britling, pursuing his examination of the
matter, "is that, looking at these things as one does now, as things
quite possible, they are not nearly so terrifying and devastating to the
mind as they would have seemed--last week. I believe I should load you
all into Gladys and start off westward with a kind of exhilaration...."

She looked at him as if she would speak, and said nothing. She suspected
him of hating his home and affecting to care for it out of politeness to
her....

"Perhaps mankind tries too much to settle down. Perhaps these stirrings
up have to occur to save us from our disposition to stuffy comfort.