r manner instead of pride. And he was a little disappointed too by a
certain lack of splendour in the company. The ladies affected him as
being ill-dressed; there was none of the hard snap, the "_There!_ and
what do you say to it?" about them of the well-dressed American woman,
and the men too were not so much tailored as unobtrusively and yet
grammatically clothed.

Section 4

He was still only in the fragmentary stage of conversation when
everything was thrown into commotion by the important arrival of Lady
Frensham, and there was a general reshuffling of places. Lady Frensham
had arrived from London by automobile; she appeared in veils and
swathings and a tremendous dust cloak, with a sort of nephew in her
train who had driven the car. She was manifestly a constitutionally
triumphant woman. A certain afternoon lassitude vanished in the swirl
of her arrival. Mr. Philbert removed wrappings and handed them to the
manservant.

"I lunched with Sir Edward Carson to-day, my dear," she told Lady
Homartyn, and rolled a belligerent eye at Philbert.

"And is he as obdurate as ever?" asked Sir Thomas.

"Obdurate! It's Redmond who's obdurate," cried Lady Frensham. "What do
you say, Mr. Britling?"

"A plague on both your parties," said Mr. Britling.

"You can't keep out of things like that," said Lady Frensham with the
utmost gusto, "when the country's on the very verge of civil war.... You
people who try to pretend there isn't a grave crisis when there is one,
will be more accountable than any one--when the civil war does come. It
won't spare you. Mark my words!"

The party became a circle.

Mr. Direck found himself the interested auditor of a real English
country-house week-end political conversation. This at any rate was like
the England of which Mrs. Humphry Ward's novels had informed him, but
yet not exactly like it. Perhaps that was due to the fact that for the
most part these novels dealt with the England of the 'nineties, and
things had lost a little in dignity since those days. But at any rate
here were political figures and titled people, and they were talking
about the "country."...

Was it possible that people of this sort did "run" the country, after
all?... When he had read Mrs. Humphry Ward in America he had always
accepted this theory of the story quite easily, but now that he saw and
heard them--!

But all governments and rulers and ruling classes when you look at them
closely are incredible....