One Saturday afternoon Mr. Britling found himself with Mrs. Britling at Claverings.  Lady Homartyn was in mourning for her two nephews, the Glassington boys, who had both been killed, one in Flanders, the other in Gallipoli.  Raeburn was there too, despondent and tired-looking.  There were three young men in khaki, one with the red of a staff officer; there were two or three women whom Mr. Britling had not met before, and Miss Sharsper the novelist, fresh from nursing experience among the convalescents in the south of France.  But he was disgusted to find that the gathering was dominated by his old antagonist, Lady Frensham, unsubdued, unaltered, rampant over them all, arrogant, impudent, insulting.  She was in mourning, she had the most splendid black furs Mr. Britling had ever seen; her large triumphant profile came out of them like the head of a vulture out of its ruff; her elder brother was a wounded prisoner in Germany, her second was dead; it would seem that hers were the only sacrifices the war had yet extorted from any one.  She spoke as though it gave her the sole right to criticise the war or claim compensation for the war.

Her incurable propensity to split the country, to make mischievous accusations against classes and districts and public servants, was having full play.  She did her best to provoke Mr. Britling into a dispute, and throw some sort of imputation upon his patriotism as distinguished from her own noisy and intolerant conceptions of “loyalty.”

She tried him first with conscription.  She threw out insults at the shirkers and the “funk classes.”  All the middle-class people clung on to their wretched little businesses, made any sort of excuse....

Mr. Britling was stung to defend them.  “A business,” he said acidly, “isn’t like land, which waits and grows rich for its owner.  And these people can’t leave ferrety little agents behind them when they go off to serve.  Tens of thousands of middle-class men have ruined themselves and flung away every prospect they had in the world to go to this war.”

“And scores of thousands haven’t!” said Lady Frensham.  “They are the men I’m thinking of."...

Mr. Britling ran through a little list of aristocratic stay-at-homes that began with a duke.

“And not a soul speaks to them in consequence,” she said.

She shifted her attack to the Labour people.  They would rather see the country defeated than submit to a little discipline.

“Because they have no faith in the house of lawyers or the house of landlords,” said Mr. Britling.  “Who can blame them?”

She proceeded to tell everybody what she would do with strikers.  She would give them “short shrift.”  She would give them a taste of the Prussian way—­homoeopathic treatment.  “But of course old vote-catching Asquith daren’t—­he daren’t!” Mr. Britling opened his mouth and said nothing; he was silenced.  The men in khaki listened respectfully but ambiguously; one of