Her confession struck him, while he listened to it, as the sweetest and most womanly one he had ever heard.

“I cannot imagine your pretending,” he answered, and felt that the remark was as inane as if he had quoted it from a play.  After a moment, as she seemed to be waiting for something, he continued with greater assurance, “I dare say they have a quality that the older generation missed.  It isn’t just commonness.  The modern spirit means, I suppose, a breathless vitality.  We are more intensely alive than our ancestors, perhaps, more restless, more inclined to take risks.”

The phrases he had used made him think suddenly of Gideon Vetch.  Was that the secret of the Governor’s irresistible magnetism, of his meteoric rise into power?  He embodied the modern fetish—­success; he was, in the lively idiom of the younger set,—­personified “pep.”  After all, if the old order crumbled, was it not because of its own weakness?  Was not the fact of its decay the sign of some secret disintegration, of rottenness at the core?  And if the new spirit could destroy, perhaps it could build as well.  There might be more in it, he was beginning to discern, than mere lack of control, than vulgar hysteria and undisciplined violence.  The quality expressed by that dreadful word was the sparkle on the edge of the tempest, the lightning flash that revealed the presence of electricity in the air.  After all, the god of the future was riding the whirlwind.

“I wonder if we can be wrong, you and I?” he went on presently, forgetting the intensely personal nature of Margaret’s disclosures, while he followed the abstract trend of his reflections.  “Isn’t it conceivable that we are standing, not for what is necessarily better, but simply for what is old?  Isn’t the conservative merely the creature of habit?  I suppose the older generation always looks disapprovingly at the younger, and, in spite of our youth, we really belong to the past generation.  We see things through the eyes of our parents.  We are mentally middle-aged—­for middle age is a state of mind, after all.  You and I were broken in by tradition—­at least I know I was, and even the war couldn’t free me.  It only made me restless and dissatisfied.  It destroyed my belief in the past without giving me faith in the future.  It left me eager to go somewhere; but it failed to offer me any direction.  It put me to sea without a compass.”

Clasping his hands behind his head, he leaned back against the carving of his chair, and fixed his gaze on the portrait of the English ancestress over the mantelpiece.  The firelight flickered over his firm, clear-cut features, over the sleek dark hair, which was brushed straight back from his forehead, and over his sombre smoke-coloured eyes in which a dusky glow came and went.  Margaret, watching him with her pensive smile, thought that she had never seen him look so “interesting.”