is bow at a venture, he paused, doubtful of his wisdom.
A glance at Derek's face confirmed his doubt. It was closer than ever,
more defiant.

"There's a lot of money in revolution, Uncle Felix--other people's."

Dash the young brute! There was something in him! He swerved off to a
fresh line.

"How do you like London?"

"I don't like it. But, Uncle Felix, don't you wish YOU were seeing it
for the first time? What books you'd write!"

Felix felt that unconscious thrust go 'home.' Revolt against staleness
and clipped wings, against the terrible security of his too solid
reputation, smote him.

"What strikes you most about it, then?" he asked.

"That it ought to be jolly well blown up. Everybody seems to know that,
too--they look it, anyway, and yet they go on as if it oughtn't."

"Why ought it to be blown up?"

"Well, what's the good of anything while London and all these other big
towns are sitting on the country's chest? England must have been a fine
place once, though!"

"Some of us think it a fine place still."

"Of course it is, in a way. But anything new and keen gets sat on.
England's like an old tom-cat by the fire: too jolly comfortable for
anything!"

At this support to his own theory that the country was going to the
dogs, owing to such as John and Stanley, Felix thought: 'Out of the
mouths of babes!' But he merely said: "You're a cheerful young man!"

"It's got cramp," Derek muttered; "can't even give women votes. Fancy my
mother without a vote! And going to wait till every laborer is off the
land before it attends to them. It's like the port you gave us last
night, Uncle Felix, wonderful crust!"

"And what is to be your contribution to its renovation?"

Derek's face instantly resumed its peculiar defiant smile, and Felix
thought: 'Young beggar! He's as close as wax.' After their little
talk, however, he had more understanding of his nephew. His defiant
self-sufficiency seemed more genuine....

In spite of his sensations when dining with Felix, John Freeland (little
if not punctilious) decided that it was incumbent on him to have the
'young Tods' to dinner, especially since Frances Freeland had come to
stay with him the day after the arrival of those two young people at
Hampstead. She had reached Porchester Gardens faintly flushed from
the prospect of seeing darling John, with one large cane trunk, and a
hand-bag of a pattern which the man in the shop had told her was the
best thing out. I