politician. He would never
have admitted for a moment that certain doors had been banged-to at his
birth, bolted when he went to Eton, and padlocked at Cambridge. No
one would have denied that there was much that was valuable in his
standards--a high level of honesty, candour, sportsmanship, personal
cleanliness, and self-reliance, together with a dislike of such cruelty
as had been officially (so to speak) recognized as cruelty, and a sense
of public service to a State run by and for the public schools; but it
would have required far more originality than he possessed ever to look
at Life from any other point of view than that from which he had been
born and bred to watch Her. To fully understand harbinger, one must,
and with unprejudiced eyes and brain, have attended one of those great
cricket matches in which he had figured conspicuously as a boy, and
looking down from some high impartial spot have watched the ground
at lunch time covered from rope to rope and stand to stand with a
marvellous swarm, all walking in precisely the same manner, with
precisely the same expression on their faces, under precisely the same
hats--a swarm enshrining the greatest identity of, creed and habit ever
known since the world began. No, his environment had not been favourable
to originality. Moreover he was naturally rapid rather than deep, and
life hardly ever left him alone or left him silent. Brought into contact
day and night with people to whom politics were more or less a game; run
after everywhere; subjected to no form of discipline--it was a wonder
that he was as serious as he was. Nor had he ever been in love, until,
last year, during her first season, Barbara had, as he might have
expressed it--in the case of another 'bowled him middle stump. Though
so deeply smitten, he had not yet asked her to marry him--had not, as
it were, had time, nor perhaps quite the courage, or conviction. When
he was near her, it seemed impossible that he could go on longer without
knowing his fate; when he was away from her it was almost a relief,
because there were so many things to be done and said, and so little
time to do or say them in. But now, during this fortnight, which, for
her sake, he had devoted to Miltoun's cause, his feeling had advanced
beyond the point of comfort.

He did not admit that the reason of this uneasiness was Courtier, for,
after all, Courtier was, in a sense, nobody, and 'an extremist' into
the bargain, and an extremist