months to engulf the Square and all that the Square had ever meant
in his life. Though he was only twenty-six, he felt that he had watched
the decay and dissolution of a hundred years. Nothing of the past
remained untouched. Not the old buildings, not the old trees, not even
the old memories. Clustering traditions had fled in the white blaze of
electricity; the quaint brick walks, with their rich colour in the
sunlight, were beginning to disappear beneath the expressionless mask of
concrete. It was all changed since his father's or his grandfather's
day; it was all obvious and cheap, he thought; it was all ugly and naked
and undistinguished--yet the tide of the new ideas was still rising.
Democracy, relentless, disorderly, and strewn with the wreckage of finer
things, had overwhelmed the world of established customs in which he
lived.

As he lifted his face to the sky, his grave young features revealed a
subtle kinship to the statues beneath the mounted Washington in the
drive, as if both flesh and bronze had been moulded by the dominant
spirit of race. Like the heroes of the Revolution, he appeared a
stranger in an age which had degraded manners and enthroned commerce;
and like them also he seemed to survey the present from some
inaccessible height of the past. Dignity he had in abundance, and a
certain mellow, old-fashioned quality; yet, in spite of his
well-favoured youth, he was singularly lacking in sympathetic appeal.
Already people were beginning to say that they "admired Culpeper; but he
was a bit of a prig, and they couldn't get really in touch with him."
His attitude of mind, which was passive but critical, had developed the
faculties of observation rather than the habits of action. As a member
of the community he was indifferent and amiable, gay and ironic. Only
the few who had seen his reserve break down before the rush of an
uncontrollable impulse suspected that there were rich veins of feeling
buried beneath his conventional surface, and that he cherished an
inarticulate longing for heroic and splendid deeds. The war had left
him with a nervous malady which he had never entirely overcome; and this
increased both his romantic dissatisfaction with his life and his
inability to make a sustained effort to change it.

The sky had faded swiftly to pale orange; the distant buildings appeared
to swim toward him in the silver air; and the naked trees barred the
white slopes with violet shadows. In the topmost bra