_Lingula_, that is found in the oldest rocks and lives to-day:
it fitted its easy conditions, and it has never modified since. Why
should it? It excretes all its disturbing forces. Our younger sons go
away and found colonial empires. Our surplus cottage children emigrate
to Australia and Canada or migrate into the towns. It doesn't alter
_this_...."

Section 12

Mr. Direck's eye had come to rest upon the barn, and its expression
changed slowly from lazy appreciation to a brightening intelligence.
Suddenly he resolved to say something. He resolved to say it so firmly
that he determined to say it even if Mr. Britling went on talking all
the time.

"I suppose, Mr. Britling," he said, "this barn here dates from the days
of Queen Anne."

"The walls of the yard here are probably earlier: probably monastic.
That grey patch in the corner, for example. The barn itself is
Georgian."

"And here it is still. And this farmyard, here it is still."

Mr. Britling was for flying off again, but Mr. Direck would not listen;
he held on like a man who keeps his grip on a lasso.

"There's one thing I would like to remark about your barn, Mr. Britling,
and I might, while I am at it, say the same thing about your farmyard."

Mr. Britling was held. "What's that?" he asked.

"Well," said Mr. Direck, "the point that strikes me most about all this
is that that barn isn't a barn any longer, and that this farmyard isn't
a farmyard. There isn't any wheat or chaff or anything of that sort in
the barn, and there never will be again: there's just a pianola and a
dancing floor, and if a cow came into this farmyard everybody in the
place would be shooing it out again. They'd regard it as a most
unnatural object."

He had a pleasant sense of talking at last. He kept right on. He was
moved to a sweeping generalisation.

"You were so good as to ask me, Mr. Britling, a little while ago, what
my first impression of England was. Well, Mr. Britling, my first
impression of England that seems to me to matter in the least is this:
that it looks and feels more like the traditional Old England than any
one could possibly have believed, and that in reality it is less like
the traditional Old England than any one would ever possibly have
imagined."

He was carried on even further. He made a tremendous literary epigram.
"I thought," he said, "when I looked out of the train this morning that
I had come to the England of Washington Irving. I find it is n