ifferences in
the world--so it had all ended for him--but those that marked at every
turn the manners he had for three months been observing in good society.
The general wide deviation of this body occupied his mind to the
exclusion of almost everything else, and he had finally been brought to
believe that even in his slow-paced prime he must have hung behind his
contemporaries. He had not supposed at the moment--in the fifties and
the sixties--that he passed for old-fashioned, but life couldn't have
left him so far in the rear had the start between them originally been
fair. This was the way he had more than once put the matter to the girl;
which gives a sufficient hint, it is hoped, of the range of some
of their talk. It had always wound up indeed, their talk, with some
assumption of the growth of his actual understanding; but it was just
these pauses in the fray that seemed to lead from time to time to a
sharper clash. It was apt to be when he felt as if he had exhausted
surprises that he really received his greatest shocks. There were no
such queer-tasting draughts as some of those yielded by the bucket that
had repeatedly, as he imagined, touched the bottom of the well. "Now
this sudden invasion of somebody's--heaven knows whose--house, and our
dropping down on it like a swarm of locusts: I dare say it isn't civil
to criticise it when one's going too, so almost culpably, with the
stream; but what are people made of that they consent, just for money,
to the violation of their homes?"

Nanda wondered; she cultivated the sense of his making her intensely
reflect, "But haven't people in England always let their places?"

"If we're a nation of shopkeepers, you mean, it can't date, on the scale
on which we show it, only from last week? No doubt, no doubt, and the
more one thinks of it the more one seems to see that society--for we're
IN society, aren't we, and that's our horizon?--can never have been
anything but increasingly vulgar. The point is that in the twilight of
time--and I belong, you see, to the twilight--it had made out much less
how vulgar it COULD be. It did its best very probably, but there were
too many superstitions it had to get rid of. It has been throwing them
overboard one by one, so that now the ship sails uncommonly light.
That's the way"--and with his eyes on the golden distance he ingeniously
followed it out--"I come to feel so the lurching and pitching. If I
weren't a pretty fair sailor--well, a