“How do you like your Uncle John?”

“He doesn’t like me, Uncle Felix.”

Somewhat baffled, Felix proceeded: 

“I say, Derek, fortunately or unfortunately, I’ve some claim now to a little knowledge of you.  You’ve got to open out a bit to me.  What are you going to do with yourself in life?  You can’t support Nedda on revolution.”

Having drawn this bow at a venture, he paused, doubtful of his wisdom.  A glance at Derek’s face confirmed his doubt.  It was closer than ever, more defiant.

“There’s a lot of money in revolution, Uncle Felix—­other people’s.”

Dash the young brute!  There was something in him!  He swerved off to a fresh line.

“How do you like London?”

“I don’t like it.  But, Uncle Felix, don’t you wish you were seeing it for the first time?  What books you’d write!”

Felix felt that unconscious thrust go ‘home.’  Revolt against staleness and clipped wings, against the terrible security of his too solid reputation, smote him.

“What strikes you most about it, then?” he asked.

“That it ought to be jolly well blown up.  Everybody seems to know that, too—­they look it, anyway, and yet they go on as if it oughtn’t.”

“Why ought it to be blown up?”

“Well, what’s the good of anything while London and all these other big towns are sitting on the country’s chest?  England must have been a fine place once, though!”

“Some of us think it a fine place still.”

“Of course it is, in a way.  But anything new and keen gets sat on.  England’s like an old tom-cat by the fire:  too jolly comfortable for anything!”

At this support to his own theory that the country was going to the dogs, owing to such as John and Stanley, Felix thought:  ’Out of the mouths of babes!’ But he merely said:  “You’re a cheerful young man!”

“It’s got cramp,” Derek muttered; “can’t even give women votes.  Fancy my mother without a vote!  And going to wait till every laborer is off the land before it attends to them.  It’s like the port you gave us last night, Uncle Felix, wonderful crust!”

“And what is to be your contribution to its renovation?”

Derek’s face instantly resumed its peculiar defiant smile, and Felix thought:  ‘Young beggar!  He’s as close as wax.’  After their little talk, however, he had more understanding of his nephew.  His defiant self-sufficiency seemed more genuine. . . .

In spite of his sensations when dining with Felix, John Freeland (little if not punctilious) decided that it was incumbent on him to have the ‘young Tods’ to dinner, especially since Frances Freeland had come to stay with him the day after the arrival of those two young people at Hampstead.  She had reached Porchester Gardens faintly flushed from the prospect of seeing darling John, with one large cane trunk, and a hand-bag of a pattern which the