ng through the working quarters of the city, and at Stennynge he
was well acquainted with all the cottagers and farmers alike. In one
family he had put out a puppy at walk; in another he had let off a man
who had poached a pheasant when his wife was ill; in a third he had
stood godfather to the baby when the father was killed falling from a
stack. He felt a kind of warmth towards the poor whenever he saw them
upon his own estate.

But of the average voter, such as the Archbishop described, he could not
think without pain and apprehension. Coming to London from any part of
the country, he always closed his eyes as the train entered the suburbs.
Those long rows of monotonous little houses--so decent, so uneventful,
so temporary--oppressed him like a physical disease. If he contemplated
them, they induced violent dyspepsia, such as he had once incurred by
visiting the Crystal Palace. The consciousness that they were there,
even as he passed through tunnels, lowered his vitality until he reached
his town house or club in the centre of things. Not even the
considerable income he derived from land on the outskirts of a large
manufacturing town consoled him for the horror of the town's extension.
In those uniform houses--in their railings, their Venetian blinds,
indiarubber plants, and stained-glass panels to the doors--he beheld the
coming degradation of his country. He saw them, like great armies of
white or red ants, creeping over the land, devouring all that was
beautiful in it, or ancient, or redolent of grandeur. Bit by bit, street
by street, the ignoble, the tidy, the pettiness of the parlour, was
gaining upon splendour and renown, and the anticipation of the change
cast a foreboding sadness over the beauty of his own ancestral home. It
tainted even his unuttered pride in his son, who had been at Eton
without expulsion, and served two years in the Foot Guards without
discredit. And now, there was his grandson.

What future could be theirs? Should a Runnymede sit in a House shorn of
its prerogatives, bound to impotence, reduced to a mere echo of popular
caprice, with hardly the delaying power of a chaperon at a ball? Or
should a son of his trot round from door to door, seeking the suffrages
of those distressing suburbs at the polls--a son whose ancestry had
known the favour of princes, and withstood foes and traitors upon the
field? Lord Runnymede himself had never thought of election, even before
the House of Lords rec