He saw his own way clear.

“The scale has altered.  It does not matter now in the least if we are ruined.  It does not matter in the least if we have to live upon potatoes and run into debt for our rent.  These now are the most incidental of things.  A week ago they would have been of the first importance.  Here we are face to face with the greatest catastrophe and the greatest opportunity in history.  We have to plunge through catastrophe to opportunity.  There is nothing to be done now in the whole world except to get the best out of this tremendous fusing up of all the settled things of life.”  He had got what he wanted.  He left her standing upon the lawn and hurried back to his desk....

Section 6

When Mr. Britling, after a strenuous morning among high ideals, descended for lunch, he found Mr. Lawrence Carmine had come over to join him at that meal.  Mr. Carmine was standing in the hall with his legs very wide apart reading The Times for the fourth time.  “I can do no work,” he said, turning round.  “I can’t fix my mind.  I suppose we are going to war.  I’d got so used to the war with Germany that I never imagined it would happen.  Gods! what a bore it will be....  And Maxse and all those scaremongers cock-a-hoop and ‘I told you so.’  Damn these Germans!”

He looked despondent and worried.  He followed Mr. Britling towards the dining-room with his hands deep in his pockets.

“It’s going to be a tremendous thing,” he said, after he had greeted Mrs. Britling and Hugh and Aunt Wilshire and Teddy, and seated himself at Mr. Britling’s hospitable board.  “It’s going to upset everything.  We don’t begin to imagine all the mischief it is going to do.”

Mr. Britling was full of the heady draught of liberal optimism he had been brewing upstairs.  “I am not sorry I have lived to see this war,” he said.  “It may be a tremendous catastrophe in one sense, but in another it is a huge step forward in human life.  It is the end of forty years of evil suspense.  It is crisis and solution.”

“I wish I could see it like that,” said Mr. Carmine.

“It is like a thaw—­everything has been in a frozen confusion since that Jew-German Treaty of Berlin.  And since 1871.”

“Why not since Schleswig-Holstein?” said Mr. Carmine.

“Why not?  Or since the Treaty of Vienna?”

“Or since—­One might go back.”

“To the Roman Empire,” said Hugh.

“To the first conquest of all,” said Teddy....

“I couldn’t work this morning,” said Hugh.  “I have been reading in the Encyclopaedia about races and religions in the Balkans....  It’s very mixed.”

“So long as it could only be dealt with piecemeal,” said Mr. Britling.  “And that is just where the tremendous opportunity of this war comes in.  Now everything becomes fluid.  We can redraw the map of the world.  A week ago we were all quarrelling bitterly about things too little for human impatience.  Now suddenly we face an epoch.  This is an epoch.  The world is plastic for men to do what they will with it.  This is the end and the beginning of an age.  This is something far greater than the French Revolution or the Reformation....  And we live in it....”