s hands into his pockets
and stood looking out with a far from cheerful countenance.

One of the things that most tormented him indeed in this recent
existence was a perpetual pricking sense of the contrast between this
small world of his ancestral possessions and traditions, with all its
ceremonial and feudal usage, and the great rushing world outside it of
action and of thought. Do what he would, he could not un-king himself
within the limits of the Maxwell estate. To the people living upon it he
was the man of most importance within their ken, was inevitably their
potentate and earthly providence. He confessed that there was a real
need of him, if he did his duty. But on this need the class-practice of
generations had built up a deference, a sharpness of class-distinction,
which any modern must find more and more irksome in proportion to his
modernness. What was in Aldous's mind, as he stood with drawn brows
looking out over the view which showed him most of his domain, was a
sort of hot impatience of being made day by day, in a hundred foolish
ways, to play at greatness.

Yet, as we know, he was no democrat by conviction, had no comforting
faith in what seemed to him the rule of a multitudinous ignorance. Still
every sane man of to-day knows, at any rate, that the world has taken
the road of democracy, and that the key to the future, for good or ill,
lies not in the revolts and speculations of the cultivated few, but in
the men and movements that can seize the many. Aldous's temper was
despondently critical towards the majority of these, perhaps; he had,
constitutionally, little of that poet's sympathy with the crowd, as
such, which had given Hallin his power. But, at any rate, they filled
the human stage--these men and movements--and his mind as a beholder.
Beside the great world-spectacle perpetually in his eye and thought, the
small old-world pomps and feudalisms of his own existence had a way of
looking ridiculous to him. He constantly felt himself absurd. It was
ludicrously clear to him, for instance, that in this kingdom he had
inherited it would be thought a huge condescension on his part if he
were to ask the secretary of a trades union to dine with him at the
Court. Whereas, in his own honest opinion, the secretary had a far more
important and interesting post in the universe than he.

So that, in spite of a strong love of family, rigidly kept to himself,
he had very few of the illusions which make rank a