ore rounded off, much more closed in, a cell,
a real social unit, a different thing altogether from this place of
meeting. Our boys play cheerfully with all comers; little Andre hasn't
learnt to play with any outside children at all. We must seem incredibly
_open_ to these Van der Pants. A house without sides.... Last Sunday I
could not find out the names of the two girls who came on bicycles and
played so well. They came with Kitty Westropp. And Van der Pant wanted
to know how they were related to us. Or how was it they came?...

"Look at Madame. She's built on a fundamentally different plan from any
of our womenkind here. Tennis, the bicycle, co-education, the two-step,
the higher education of women.... Say these things over to yourself, and
think of her. It's like talking of a nun in riding breeches. She's a
specialised woman, specialising in womanhood, her sphere is the home.
Soft, trailing, draping skirts, slow movements, a veiled face; for no
Oriental veil could be more effectual than her beautiful Catholic
quiet. Catholicism invented the invisible purdah. She is far more akin
to that sweet little Indian lady with the wonderful robes whom Carmine
brought over with her tall husband last summer, than she is to Letty or
Cissie. She, too, undertook to play hockey. And played it very much as
Madame Van der Pant played it....

"The more I see of our hockey," said Mr. Britling, "the more wonderful
it seems to me as a touchstone of character and culture and
breeding...."

Mr. Manning, to whom he was delivering this discourse, switched him on
to a new track by asking what he meant by "Neo-European."

"It's a bad phrase," said Mr. Britling. "I'll withdraw it. Let me try
and state exactly what I have in mind. I mean something that is coming
up in America and here and the Scandinavian countries and Russia, a new
culture, an escape from the Levantine religion and the Catholic culture
that came to us from the Mediterranean. Let me drop Neo-European; let me
say Northern. We are Northerners. The key, the heart, the nucleus and
essence of every culture is its conception of the relations of men and
women; and this new culture tends to diminish the specialisation of
women as women, to let them out from the cell of the home into common
citizenship with men. It's a new culture, still in process of
development, which will make men more social and co-operative and women
bolder, swifter, more responsible and less cloistered. It minimi