“Your chauffeur would like to know, what time you will have the car?”

“Directly after dinner.”

Twenty minutes later, he was turning through the scrolled iron gates into the road for London.  It was falling dark; and in the tremulous sky clouds were piled up, and drifted here and there with a sort of endless lack of purpose.  No direction seemed to have been decreed unto their wings.  They had met together in the firmament like a flock of giant magpies crossing and re-crossing each others’ flight.  The smell of rain was in the air.  The car raised no dust, but bored swiftly on, searching out the road with its lamps.  On Putney Bridge its march was stayed by a string of waggons.  Lord Valleys looked to right and left.  The river reflected the thousand lights of buildings piled along her sides, lamps of the embankments, lanterns of moored barges.  The sinuous pallid body of this great Creature, for ever gliding down to the sea, roused in his mind no symbolic image.  He had had to do with her, years back, at the Board of Trade, and knew her for what she was, extremely dirty, and getting abominably thin just where he would have liked her plump.  Yet, as he lighted a cigar, there came to him a queer feeling—­as if he were in the presence of a woman he was fond of.

“I hope to God,” he thought, “nothing’ll come of these scares!” The car glided on into the long road, swarming with traffic, towards the fashionable heart of London.  Outside stationers’ shops, however, the posters of evening papers were of no reassuring order.

‘Theplot thickens.’ 
‘More revelations.’ 
‘Grave situation threatened.’

And before each poster could be seen a little eddy in the stream of the passers-by—­formed by persons glancing at the news, and disengaging themselves, to press on again.  The Earl of Valleys caught himself wondering what they thought of it!  What was passing behind those pale rounds of flesh turned towards the posters?

Did they think at all, these men and women in the street?  What was their attitude towards this vaguely threatened cataclysm?  Face after face, stolid and apathetic, expressed nothing, no active desire, certainly no enthusiasm, hardly any dread.  Poor devils!  The thing, after all, was no more within their control than it was within the power of ants to stop the ruination of their ant-heap by some passing boy!  It was no doubt quite true, that the people had never had much voice in the making of war.  And the words of a Radical weekly, which as an impartial man he always forced himself to read, recurred to him.  “Ignorant of the facts, hypnotized by the words ‘Country’ and ‘Patriotism’; in the grip of mob-instinct and inborn prejudice against the foreigner; helpless by reason of his patience, stoicism, good faith, and confidence in those above him; helpless by reason of his snobbery, mutual distrust, carelessness for the morrow, and lack of public spirit-in the face of War how impotent and to be pitied is the man in the street!” That paper, though clever, always seemed to him intolerably hifalutin’!