d not crystallized out
in Sir Richmond's mind before his talks with Dr. Martineau. The idea of
a New Age necessarily carries with it the idea of fresh rules of conduct
and of different relationships between human beings. And it throws
those who talk about it into the companionship of a common enterprise.
To-morrow the New Age will be here no doubt, but today it is the hope
and adventure of only a few human beings.

So that it was natural for Miss Grammont and Sir Richmond to ask: "What
are we to do with such types as father?" and to fall into an idiom that
assumed a joint enterprise. They had agreed by a tacit consent to a
common conception of the world they desired as a world scientifically
ordered, an immense organization of mature commonsense, healthy and
secure, gathering knowledge and power for creative adventures as yet
beyond dreaming. They were prepared to think of the makers of the
Avebury dyke as their yesterday selves, of the stone age savages as
a phase, in their late childhood, and of this great world order Sir
Richmond foresaw as a day where dawn was already at hand. And in such
long perspectives, the states, governments and institutions of to-day
became very temporary-looking and replaceable structures indeed. Both
these two people found themselves thinking in this fashion with an
unwonted courage and freedom because the other one had been disposed to
think in this fashion before. Sir Richmond was still turning over in
his mind the happy mutual release of the imagination this chance
companionship had brought about when he found himself back again at the
threshold of the Old George.

Section 4

Sir Richmond Hardy was not the only man who was thinking intently about
Miss Grammont at that particular moment. Two gentlemen were coming
towards her across the Atlantic whose minds, it chanced, were very
busily occupied by her affairs. One of these was her father, who
was lying in his brass bed in his commodious cabin on the Hollandia,
regretting his diminishing ability to sleep in the early morning now,
even when he was in the strong and soothing air of mid-Atlantic, and
thinking of V.V. because she had a way of coming into his mind when it
was undefended; and the other was Mr. Gunter Lake on the Megantic,
one day out from Sandy Hook, who found himself equally sleepless and
preoccupied. And although Mr. Lake was a man of vast activities and
complicated engagements he was coming now to Europe for the express
p