Now it had never occurred to Mr. Direck to ask why there were no Indian nor Chinese Utopias, and even Mr. Carmine seemed surprised to discover this deficiency.

“The primitive patriarchal village is Utopia to India and China,” said Mr. Carmine, when they had a little digested the inquiry.  “Or at any rate it is their social ideal.  They want no Utopias.”

“Utopias came with cities,” he said, considering the question.  “And the first cities, as distinguished from courts and autocratic capitals, came with ships.  India and China belong to an earlier age.  Ships, trade, disorder, strange relationships, unofficial literature, criticism—­and then this idea of some novel remaking of society....”

Section 8

Then Mr. Direck fell into the hands of Hugh, the eldest son, and anticipating the inevitable, said that he liked to walk in the rose garden.  So they walked in the rose garden.

“Do you read Utopias?” said Mr. Direck, cutting any preface, in the English manner.

“Oh, rather!” said Hugh, and became at once friendly and confidential.

“We all do,” he explained.  “In England everybody talks of change and nothing ever changes.”

“I found Miss Corner reading—­what was it? the Sun People?—­some old classical Italian work.”

“Campanella,” said Hugh, without betraying the slightest interest in Miss Corner.  “Nothing changes in England, because the people who want to change things change their minds before they change anything else.  I’ve been in London talking for the last half-year.  Studying art they call it.  Before that I was a science student, and I want to be one again.  Don’t you think, Sir, there’s something about science—­it’s steadier than anything else in the world?”

Mr. Direck thought that the moral truths of human nature were steadier than science, and they had one of those little discussions of real life that begin about a difference inadequately apprehended, and do not so much end as are abandoned.  Hugh struck him as being more speculative and detached than any American college youth of his age that he knew—­but that might not be a national difference but only the Britling strain.  He seemed to have read more and more independently, and to be doing less.  And he was rather more restrained and self-possessed.

Before Mr. Direck could begin a proper inquiry into the young man’s work and outlook, he had got the conversation upon America.  He wanted tremendously to see America.  “The dad says in one of his books that over here we are being and that over there you are beginning.  It must be tremendously stimulating to think that your country is still being made....”

Mr. Direck thought that an interesting point of view.  “Unless something tumbles down here, we never think of altering it,” the young man remarked.  “And even then we just shore it up.”