But upon the question of labour Mr. Grammont was fierce, even for an American business man, and one night at a dinner party he discovered his daughter displaying what he considered an improper familiarity with socialist ideas.  This had produced a violent revulsion towards the purdah system and the idea of a matrimonial alliance with Gunter Lake.  Gunter Lake, Sir Richmond gathered, wasn’t half a bad fellow.  Generally it would seem Miss Grammont liked him, and she had a way of speaking about him that suggested that in some way Mr. Lake had been rather hardly used and had acquired merit by his behaviour under bad treatment.  There was some story, however, connected with her war services in Europe upon which Miss Grammont was evidently indisposed to dwell.  About that story Sir Richmond was left at the end of his Avebury day and after his last talk with Dr. Martineau, still quite vaguely guessing.

So much fact about Miss Grammont as we have given had floated up in fragments and pieced itself together in Sir Richmond’s mind in the course of a day and a half.  The fragments came up as allusions or by way of illustration.  The sustaining topic was this New Age Sir Richmond fore shadowed, this world under scientific control, the Utopia of fully developed people fully developing the resources of the earth.  For a number of trivial reasons Sir Richmond found himself ascribing the project of this New Age almost wholly to Dr. Martineau, and presenting it as a much completer scheme than he was justified in doing.  It was true that Dr. Martineau had not said many of the things Sir Richmond ascribed to him, but also it was true that they had not crystallized out in Sir Richmond’s mind before his talks with Dr. Martineau.  The idea of a New Age necessarily carries with it the idea of fresh rules of conduct and of different relationships between human beings.  And it throws those who talk about it into the companionship of a common enterprise.  To-morrow the New Age will be here no doubt, but today it is the hope and adventure of only a few human beings.

So that it was natural for Miss Grammont and Sir Richmond to ask:  “What are we to do with such types as father?” and to fall into an idiom that assumed a joint enterprise.  They had agreed by a tacit consent to a common conception of the world they desired as a world scientifically ordered, an immense organization of mature commonsense, healthy and secure, gathering knowledge and power for creative adventures as yet beyond dreaming.  They were prepared to think of the makers of the Avebury dyke as their yesterday selves, of the stone age savages as a phase, in their late childhood, and of this great world order Sir Richmond foresaw as a day where dawn was already at hand.  And in such long perspectives, the states, governments and institutions of to-day became very temporary-looking and replaceable structures indeed.  Both these two people found themselves thinking in this fashion with an unwonted courage and freedom because the other one had been disposed to think in this fashion before.  Sir Richmond was still turning over in his mind the happy mutual release of the imagination this chance companionship had brought about when he found himself back again at the threshold of the Old George.