“Look at Madame.  She’s built on a fundamentally different plan from any of our womenkind here.  Tennis, the bicycle, co-education, the two-step, the higher education of women....  Say these things over to yourself, and think of her.  It’s like talking of a nun in riding breeches.  She’s a specialised woman, specialising in womanhood, her sphere is the home.  Soft, trailing, draping skirts, slow movements, a veiled face; for no Oriental veil could be more effectual than her beautiful Catholic quiet.  Catholicism invented the invisible purdah.  She is far more akin to that sweet little Indian lady with the wonderful robes whom Carmine brought over with her tall husband last summer, than she is to Letty or Cissie.  She, too, undertook to play hockey.  And played it very much as Madame Van der Pant played it....

“The more I see of our hockey,” said Mr. Britling, “the more wonderful it seems to me as a touchstone of character and culture and breeding....”

Mr. Manning, to whom he was delivering this discourse, switched him on to a new track by asking what he meant by “Neo-European.”

“It’s a bad phrase,” said Mr. Britling.  “I’ll withdraw it.  Let me try and state exactly what I have in mind.  I mean something that is coming up in America and here and the Scandinavian countries and Russia, a new culture, an escape from the Levantine religion and the Catholic culture that came to us from the Mediterranean.  Let me drop Neo-European; let me say Northern.  We are Northerners.  The key, the heart, the nucleus and essence of every culture is its conception of the relations of men and women; and this new culture tends to diminish the specialisation of women as women, to let them out from the cell of the home into common citizenship with men.  It’s a new culture, still in process of development, which will make men more social and co-operative and women bolder, swifter, more responsible and less cloistered.  It minimises instead of exaggerating the importance of sex....

“And,” said Mr. Britling, in very much the tones in which a preacher might say “Sixthly,” “it is just all this Northern tendency that this world struggle is going to release.  This war is pounding through Europe, smashing up homes, dispersing and mixing homes, setting Madame Van der Pant playing hockey, and Andre climbing trees with my young ruffians; it is killing young men by the million, altering the proportions of the sexes for a generation, bringing women into business and office and industry, destroying the accumulated wealth that kept so many of them in refined idleness, flooding the world with strange doubts and novel ideas....”

Section 9

But the conflict of manners and customs that followed the invasion of the English villages by French and Belgian refugees did not always present the immigrants as Catholics and the hosts as “Neo-European.”  In the case of Mr. Dimple it was the other way round.  He met Mr. Britling in Claverings park and told him his troubles....