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’!

It was doubtful whether he would get to Ascot this year.  And his mind flew for a moment to his promising two-year-old Casetta; then dashed almost violently, as though in shame, to the Admiralty and the doubt whether they were fully alive to possibilities.  He himself occupied a softer spot of Government, one of those almost nominal offices necessary to qualify into the Cabinet certain tried minds, for whom no more strenuous post can for the moment be found.  From the Admiralty again his thoughts leaped to his mother-in-law.  Wonderful old woman!  What a statesman she would have made!  Too reactionary!  Deuce of a straight line she had taken about Mrs. Lees Noel!  And with a connoisseur’s twinge of pleasure he recollected that lady’s face and figure seen that morning as he passed her cottage.  Mysterious or not, the woman was certainly attractive!  Very graceful head with its dark hair waved back from the middle over either temple—­very charming figure, no lumber of any sort!  Bouquet about her!  Some story or other, no doubt—­no affair of his!  Always sorry for that sort of woman!

A regiment of Territorials returning from a march stayed the progress of his car.  He leaned forward watching them with much the same contained, shrewd, critical look he would have bent on a pack of hounds.  All the mistiness and speculation in his mind was gone now.  Good stamp of man, would give a capital account of themselves!  Their faces, flushed by a day in the open, were masked with passivity, or, with a half-aggressive, half-jocular self-consciousness; they were clearly not troubled by abstract doubts, or any visions of the horrors of war.

Someone raised a cheer ‘for the Terriers!’ Lord Valleys saw round him a little sea of hats, rising and falling, and heard a sound, rather shrill and tentative, swell into hoarse, high clamour, and suddenly die out.  “Seem keen enough!” he thought.  “Very little does it!  Plenty of fighting spirit in the country.”  And again a thrill of pleasure shot through him.