n our special cases. Why shouldn't women have the
vote? they argue. What does it matter? And bang goes a bomb in
Westminster Abbey. Why shouldn't Ulster create an impossible position?
And off trots some demented Carsonite to Germany to play at treason on
some half word of the German Emperor's and buy half a million rifles....

"Exactly like children being very, very naughty....

"And," said Mr. Britling with a gesture to round off his discourse, "we
do go on. We shall go on--until there is a spark right into the
magazine. We have lost any belief we ever had that fundamental things
happen. We are everlasting children in an everlasting nursery...."

And immediately he broke out again.

"The truth of the matter is that hardly any one has ever yet mastered
the fact that the world is round. The world is round--like an orange.
The thing is told us--like any old scandal--at school. For all
practical purposes we forget it. Practically we all live in a world as
flat as a pancake. Where time never ends and nothing changes. Who really
believes in any world outside the circle of the horizon? Here we are and
visibly nothing is changing. And so we go on to--nothing will ever
change. It just goes on--in space, in time. If we could realise that
round world beyond, then indeed we should go circumspectly.... If the
world were like a whispering gallery, what whispers might we not hear
now--from India, from Africa, from Germany, warnings from the past,
intimations of the future....

"We shouldn't heed them...."

Section 6

And indeed at the very moment when Mr. Britling was saying these words,
in Sarajevo in Bosnia, where the hour was somewhat later, men whispered
together, and one held nervously to a black parcel that had been given
him and nodded as they repeated his instructions, a black parcel with
certain unstable chemicals and a curious arrangement of detonators
therein, a black parcel destined ultimately to shatter nearly every
landmark of Mr. Britling's and Lady Frensham's cosmogony....

Section 7

When Mr. Direck and Mr. Britling returned to the Dower House the guest
was handed over to Mrs. Britling and Mr. Britling vanished, to reappear
at supper time, for the Britlings had a supper in the evening instead of
dinner. When Mr. Britling did reappear every trace of his vexation with
the levities of British politics and the British ruling class had
vanished altogether, and he was no longer thinking of all that might be