Mr. Direck was altogether unprepared for a certain casualness of costume that sometimes overtook Mr. Britling.  He was wearing now a very old blue flannel blazer, no hat, and a pair of knickerbockers, not tweed breeches but tweed knickerbockers of a remarkable bagginess, and made of one of those virtuous socialistic homespun tweeds that drag out into woolly knots and strings wherever there is attrition.  His stockings were worsted and wrinkled, and on his feet were those extraordinary slippers of bright-coloured bast-like interwoven material one buys in the north of France.  These were purple with a touch of green.  He had, in fact, thought of the necessity of meeting Mr. Direck at the station at the very last moment, and had come away from his study in the clothes that had happened to him when he got up.  His face wore the amiable expression of a wire-haired terrier disposed to be friendly, and it struck Mr. Direck that for a man of his real intellectual distinction Mr. Britling was unusually short.

For there can be no denying that Mr. Britling was, in a sense, distinguished.  The hero and subject of this novel was at its very beginning a distinguished man.  He was in the Who’s Who of two continents.  In the last few years he had grown with some rapidity into a writer recognised and welcomed by the more cultivated sections of the American public, and even known to a select circle of British readers.  To his American discoverers he had first appeared as an essayist, a serious essayist who wrote about aesthetics and Oriental thought and national character and poets and painting.  He had come through America some years ago as one of those Kahn scholars, those promising writers and intelligent men endowed by Auguste Kahn of Paris, who go about the world nowadays in comfort and consideration as the travelling guests of that original philanthropist—­to acquire the international spirit.  Previously he had been a critic of art and literature and a writer of thoughtful third leaders in the London Times.  He had begun with a Pembroke fellowship and a prize poem.  He had returned from his world tour to his reflective yet original corner of The Times and to the production of books about national relationships and social psychology, that had brought him rapidly into prominence.

His was a naturally irritable mind, which gave him point and passion; and moreover he had a certain obstinate originality and a generous disposition.  So that he was always lively, sometimes spacious, and never vile.  He loved to write and talk.  He talked about everything, he had ideas about everything; he could no more help having ideas about everything than a dog can resist smelling at your heels.  He sniffed at the heels of reality.  Lots of people found him interesting and stimulating, a few found him seriously exasperating.  He had ideas in the utmost profusion about races and empires and social order and political institutions and gardens and automobiles and the future of India and China and aesthetics and America and the education of mankind in general....  And all that sort of thing....