it down and nourish her baby in my poor
old bachelor drawing-room--often at the most _unseasonable_ times.
And--so lavishly...."

Mr. Britling attempted consolations.

"But anyhow," said Mr. Dimple, "I'm better off than poor dear Mrs.
Bynne. She secured two milliners. She insisted upon them. And their
clothes were certainly beautifully made--even my poor old unworldly eye
could tell that. And she thought two milliners would be so useful with a
large family like hers. They certainly _said_ they were milliners. But
it seems--I don't know what we shall do about them.... My dear Mr.
Britling, those young women are anything but milliners--anything but
milliners...."

A faint gleam of amusement was only too perceptible through the good
man's horror.

"Sirens, my dear Mr. Britling. Sirens. By profession."...

Section 10

October passed into November, and day by day Mr. Britling was forced to
apprehend new aspects of the war, to think and rethink the war, to have
his first conclusions checked and tested, twisted askew, replaced. His
thoughts went far and wide and deeper--until all his earlier writing
seemed painfully shallow to him, seemed a mere automatic response of
obvious comments to the stimulus of the war's surprise. As his ideas
became subtler and profounder, they became more difficult to express; he
talked less; he became abstracted and irritable at table. To two people
in particular Mr. Britling found his real ideas inexpressible, to Mr.
Direck and to Mr. Van der Pant.

Each of these gentlemen brought with him the implication or the
intimation of a critical attitude towards England. It was all very well
for Mr. Britling himself to be critical of England; that is an
Englishman's privilege. To hear Mr. Van der Pant questioning British
efficiency or to suspect Mr. Direck of high, thin American superiorities
to war, was almost worse than to hear Mrs. Harrowdean saying hostile
things about Edith. It roused an even acuter protective emotion.

In the case of Mr. Van der Pant matters were complicated by the
difficulty of the language, which made anything but the crudest
statements subject to incalculable misconception.

Mr. Van der Pant had not the extreme tactfulness of his so typically
Catholic wife; he made it only too plain that he thought the British
postal and telegraph service slow and slack, and the management of the
Great Eastern branch lines wasteful and inefficient. He said the workmen
in the fields an