Mr. Direck leant against the table, wrapped in his golden pheasants, and appreciated the point.

“Your young people dance very cheerfully,” he said.

“We all dance very cheerfully,” said Mr. Britling.

“Then this Miss Corner,” said Mr. Direck, “she is the sister, I presume, is she? of that pleasant young lady who is married—­she is married, isn’t she?—­to the young man you call Teddy.”

“I should have explained these young people.  They’re the sort of young people we are producing over here now in quite enormous quantity.  They are the sort of equivalent of the Russian Intelligentsia, an irresponsible middle class with ideas.  Teddy, you know, is my secretary.  He’s the son, I believe, of a Kilburn solicitor.  He was recommended to me by Datcher of The Times.  He came down here and lived in lodgings for a time.  Then suddenly appeared the young lady.”

“Miss Corner’s sister?”

“Exactly.  The village was a little startled.  The cottager who had let the rooms came to me privately.  Teddy is rather touchy on the point of his personal independence, he considers any demand for explanations as an insult, and probably all he had said to the old lady was, ’This is Letty—­come to share my rooms.’  I put the matter to him very gently.  ‘Oh, yes,’ he said, rather in the manner of some one who has overlooked a trifle.  ’I got married to her in the Christmas holidays.  May I bring her along to see Mrs. Britling?’ We induced him to go into a little cottage I rent.  The wife was the daughter of a Colchester journalist and printer.  I don’t know if you talked to her.”

“I’ve talked to the sister rather.”

“Well, they’re both idea’d.  They’re highly educated in the sense that they do really think for themselves.  Almost fiercely.  So does Teddy.  If he thinks he hasn’t thought anything he thinks for himself, he goes off and thinks it different.  The sister is a teacher who wants to take the B.A. degree in London University.  Meanwhile she pays the penalty of her sex.”

“Meaning—?” asked Mr. Direck, startled.

“Oh! that she puts in a great deal too much of her time upon housework and minding her sister’s baby.”

“She’s a very interesting and charming young lady indeed,” said Mr. Direck.  “With a sort of Western college freedom of mind—­and something about her that isn’t American at all.”

Mr. Britling was following the train of his own thoughts.

“My household has some amusing contrasts,” he said.  “I don’t know if you have talked to that German.

“He’s always asking questions.  And you tell him any old thing and he goes and writes it down in his room upstairs, and afterwards asks you another like it in order to perplex himself by the variety of your answers.  He regards the whole world with a methodical distrust.  He wants to document it and pin it down.  He suspects it only too justly of disorderly impulses, and a capacity