Stanley, a man of some intelligence—­witness his grasp of the secret of successful plough-making (none for the home market!)—­had often considered this important proposition of phlegm.  People said England was becoming degenerate and hysterical, growing soft, and nervous, and towny, and all the rest of it.  In his view there was a good deal of bosh about that!  “Look,” he would say, “at the weight that chauffeurs put on!  Look at the House of Commons, and the size of the upper classes!” If there were growing up little shrill types of working men and Socialists, and new women, and half-penny papers, and a rather larger crop of professors and long-haired chaps—­all the better for the rest of the country!  The flesh all these skimpy ones had lost, solid people had put on.  The country might be suffering a bit from officialism, and the tendency of modern thought, but the breed was not changing.  John Bull was there all right under his moustache.  Take it off and clap on little side-whiskers, and you had as many Bulls as you liked, any day.  There would be no social upheaval so long as the climate was what it was!  And with this simple formula, and a kind of very deep-down throaty chuckle, he would pass to a subject of more immediate importance.  There was something, indeed, rather masterly in his grasp of the fact that rain might be trusted to put out any fire—­give it time.  And he kept a special vessel in a special corner which recorded for him faithfully the number of inches that fell; and now and again he wrote to his paper to say that there were more inches in his vessel than there had been “for thirty years.”  His conviction that the country was in a bad way was nothing but a skin affection, causing him local irritation rather than affecting the deeper organs of his substantial body.

He did not readily confide in Clara concerning his own family, having in a marked degree the truly domestic quality of thinking it superior to his wife’s.  She had been a Tomson, not one of the Tomsons, and it was quite a question whether he or she were trying to forget that fact the faster.  But he did say to her as he was getting into the car: 

“It’s just possible I might go round by Tod’s on my way home.  I want a run.”

She answered:  “Be careful what you say to that woman.  I don’t want her here by any chance.  The young ones were quite bad enough.”

And when he had put in his day at the works he did turn the nose of his car toward Tod’s.  Travelling along grass-bordered roads, the beauty of this England struck his not too sensitive spirit and made him almost gasp.  It was that moment of the year when the countryside seems to faint from its own loveliness, from the intoxication of its scents and sounds.  Creamy-white may, splashed here and there with crimson, flooded the hedges in breaking waves of flower-foam; the fields were all buttercup glory; every tree had its cuckoo, calling; every bush