Not that it was new to him to feel that the country was in a bad way.  On the contrary, it was his established belief, and one for which he was prepared to furnish due and proper reasons.  In the first place he traced it to the horrible hold Industrialism had in the last hundred years laid on the nation, draining the peasantry from ‘the Land’; and in the second place to the influence of a narrow and insidious Officialism, sapping the independence of the People.

This was why, in going to a conclave with his brother John, high in Government employ, and his brother Stanley, a captain of industry, possessor of the Morton Plough Works, he was conscious of a certain superiority in that he, at all events, had no hand in this paralysis which was creeping on the country.

And getting more buff-colored every minute, he threaded his way on, till, past the Marble Arch, he secured the elbow-room of Hyde Park.  Here groups of young men, with chivalrous idealism, were jeering at and chivying the broken remnants of a suffrage meeting.  Felix debated whether he should oppose his body to their bodies, his tongue to theirs, or whether he should avert his consciousness and hurry on; but, that instinct which moved him to wear the gray top hat prevailing, he did neither, and stood instead, looking at them in silent anger, which quickly provoked endearments—­such as:  “Take it off,” or “Keep it on,” or “What cheer, Toppy!” but nothing more acute.  And he meditated:  Culture!  Could culture ever make headway among the blind partisanships, the hand-to-mouth mentality, the cheap excitements of this town life?  The faces of these youths, the tone of their voices, the very look of their bowler hats, said:  No!  You could not culturalize the impermeable texture of their vulgarity.  And they were the coming manhood of the nation—­this inexpressibly distasteful lot of youths!  The country had indeed got too far away from ‘the Land.’  And this essential towny commonness was not confined to the classes from which these youths were drawn.  He had even remarked it among his own son’s school and college friends—­an impatience of discipline, an insensibility to everything but excitement and having a good time, a permanent mental indigestion due to a permanent diet of tit-bits.  What aspiration they possessed seemed devoted to securing for themselves the plums of official or industrial life.  His boy Alan, even, was infected, in spite of home influences and the atmosphere of art in which he had been so sedulously soaked.  He wished to enter his Uncle Stanley’s plough works, seeing in it a ‘soft thing.’

But the last of the woman-baiters had passed by now, and, conscious that he was really behind time, Felix hurried on. . . .