“Then every one must grab.  I haven’t much in the way of stores in the house.”

“H’m,” said Mr. Britling, and reflected....  “I don’t think we must buy stores now.”

“But if we are short.”

“It’s the chances of war,” said Mr. Britling.

He reflected.  “Those who join a panic make a panic.  After all, there is just as much food in the world as there was last month.  And short of burning it the only way of getting rid of it is to eat it.  And the harvests are good.  Why begin a scramble at a groaning board?”

“But people are scrambling!  It would be awkward—­with the children and everything—­if we ran short.”

“We shan’t.  And anyhow, you mustn’t begin hoarding, even if it means hardship.”

“Yes.  But you won’t like it if suddenly there’s no sugar for your tea.”

Mr. Britling ignored this personal application.

“What is far more serious than a food shortage is the possibility of a money panic.”

He paced the lawn with her and talked.  He said that even now very few people realised the flimsiness of the credit system by which the modern world was sustained.  It was a huge growth of confidence, due very largely to the uninquiring indolence of—­everybody.  It was sound so long as mankind did, on the whole, believe in it; give only a sufficient loss of faith and it might suffer any sort of collapse.  It might vanish altogether—­as the credit system vanished at the breaking up of Italy by the Goths—­and leave us nothing but tangible things, real property, possession nine points of the law, and that sort of thing.  Did she remember that last novel of Gissing’s?—­“Veranilda,” it was called.  It was a picture of the world when there was no wealth at all except what one could carry hidden or guarded about with one.  That sort of thing came to the Roman Empire slowly, in the course of lifetimes, but nowadays we lived in a rapider world—­with flimsier institutions.  Nobody knew the strength or the weakness of credit; nobody knew whether even the present shock might not send it smashing down....  And then all the little life we had lived so far would roll away....

Mrs. Britling, he noted, glanced ever and again at her sunlit house—­there were new sunblinds, and she had been happy in her choice of a colour—­and listened with a sceptical expression to this disquisition.

“A few days ago,” said Mr. Britling, trying to make things concrete for her, “you and I together were worth five-and-twenty thousand pounds.  Now we don’t know what we are worth; whether we have lost a thousand or ten thousand....”

He examined his sovereign purse and announced he had six pounds.  “What have you?”

She had about eighteen pounds in the house.

“We may have to get along with that for an indefinite time.”

“But the bank will open again presently,” she said.  “And people about here trust us.”