“I suppose,” he added, “there are changes.  There’s a new generation grown up....”

He looked at his barn and the swimming pool.  “It’s a good point of yours about the barn,” he said.  “What you say reminds me of that very jolly thing of Kipling’s about the old mill-wheel that began by grinding corn and ended by driving dynamos....

“Only I admit that barn doesn’t exactly drive a dynamo....

“To be frank, it’s just a pleasure barn....

“The country can afford it....”

Section 2

He left it at that for the time, but throughout the afternoon Mr. Direck had the gratification of seeing his thought floating round and round in the back-waters of Mr. Britling’s mental current.  If it didn’t itself get into the stream again its reflection at any rate appeared and reappeared.  He was taken about with great assiduity throughout the afternoon, and he got no more than occasional glimpses of the rest of the Dower House circle until six o’clock in the evening.

Meanwhile the fountains of Mr. Britling’s active and encyclopaedic mind played steadily.

He was inordinately proud of England, and he abused her incessantly.  He wanted to state England to Mr. Direck as the amiable summation of a grotesque assembly of faults.  That was the view into which the comforts and prosperities of his middle age had brought him from a radicalism that had in its earlier stages been angry and bitter.  And for Mr. Britling England was “here.”  Essex was the county he knew.  He took Mr. Direck out from his walled garden by a little door into a trim paddock with two white goals.  “We play hockey here on Sundays,” he said in a way that gave Mr. Direck no hint of the practically compulsory participation of every visitor to Matching’s Easy in this violent and dangerous exercise, and thence they passed by a rich deep lane and into a high road that ran along the edge of the deer park of Claverings.  “We will call in on Claverings later,” said Mr. Britling.  “Lady Homartyn has some people there for the week-end, and you ought to see the sort of thing it is and the sort of people they are.  She wanted us to lunch there to-morrow, but I didn’t accept that because of our afternoon hockey.”

Mr. Direck received this reason uncritically.

The village reminded Mr. Direck of Abbey’s pictures.  There was an inn with a sign standing out in the road, a painted sign of the Clavering Arms; it had a water trough (such as Mr. Weller senior ducked the dissenter in) and a green painted table outside its inviting door.  There were also a general shop and a number of very pleasant cottages, each marked with the Mainstay crest.  All this was grouped about a green with real geese drilling thereon.  Mr. Britling conducted his visitor (through a lych gate) into the church-yard, and there they found mossy, tumble-down tombstones, one with a skull and cross-bones upon it, that went