iew and the Empire Review, and the Nineteenth
Century and after jostled current books on the tables--English new books
in gaudy catchpenny "artistic" covers, French and Italian novels in
yellow, German art handbooks of almost incredible ugliness. There
were abundant evidences that her ladyship was playing with the
Keltic renascence, and a great number of ugly cats made of china--she
"collected" china and stoneware cats--stood about everywhere--in all
colours, in all kinds of deliberately comic, highly glazed distortion.

It is nonsense to pretend that finance makes any better aristocrats than
rent. Nothing can make an aristocrat but pride, knowledge, training, and
the sword. These people were no improvement on the Drews, none whatever.
There was no effect of a beneficial replacement of passive unintelligent
people by active intelligent ones. One felt that a smaller but more
enterprising and intensely undignified variety of stupidity had replaced
the large dullness of the old gentry, and that was all. Bladesover, I
thought, had undergone just the same change between the seventies and
the new century that had overtaken the dear old Times, and heaven knows
how much more of the decorous British fabric. These Lichtensteins and
their like seem to have no promise in them at all of any fresh vitality
for the kingdom. I do not believe in their intelligence or their
power--they have nothing new about them at all, nothing creative nor
rejuvenescent, no more than a disorderly instinct of acquisition; and
the prevalence of them and their kind is but a phase in the broad slow
decay of the great social organism of England. They could not have made
Bladesover they cannot replace it; they just happen to break out over
it--saprophytically.

Well--that was my last impression of Bladesover.

CHAPTER THE THIRD

THE WIMBLEHURST APPRENTICESHIP

I

So far as I can remember now, except for that one emotional phase by the
graveside, I passed through all these experiences rather callously. I
had already, with the facility of youth, changed my world, ceased to
think at all of the old school routine and put Bladesover aside for
digestion at a latter stage. I took up my new world in Wimblehurst with
the chemist's shop as its hub, set to work at Latin and materia medica,
and concentrated upon the present with all my heart. Wimblehurst is an
exceptionally quiet and grey Sussex town rare among south of England
towns in being largely built of s