Lorne Murchison had never met anyone of Hesketh’s age in Hesketh’s condition before.  Affluence and age he knew, in honourable retirement; poverty and youth he knew, embarked in the struggle; indolence and youth he also knew, as it cumbered the ground; but youth and a competence, equipped with education, industry, and vigour, searching vainly in fields empty of opportunity, was to him a new spectacle.  He himself had intended to be a lawyer since he was fourteen.  There never had been any impediment to his intention, any qualification to his desire.  He was still under his father’s roof, but that was for the general happiness; any time within the last eighteen months, if he had chosen to hurry fate, he might have selected another.  He was younger than Hesketh by a year, yet we may say that he had arrived, while Hesketh was still fidgeting at the starting-point.

“Why don’t you farm?” he asked once.

“Farming in England may pay in a quarter of a century, not before.  I can’t wait for it.  Besides, why should I farm?  Why didn’t you?”

“Well,” said Lorne, “in your case it seems about the only thing left.  I?  Oh it doesn’t attract us over there.  We’re getting away from it—­leaving it to the newcomers from this side.  Curious circle, that:  I wonder when our place gets overcrowded, where we shall go to plough?”

Hesketh’s situation occupied them a good deal; but their great topic had a wider drift, embracing nothing less than the Empire, pausing nowhere short of the flag.  The imperial idea was very much at the moment in the public mind; it hung heavily, like a banner, in every newspaper, it was filtering through the slow British consciousness, solidifying as it travelled.  In the end it might be expected to arrive at a shape in which the British consciousness must either assimilate it or cast it forth.  They were saying in the suburbs that they wanted it explained; at Hatfield they were saying, some of them, with folded arms, that it was self evident; other members of that great house, swinging their arms, called it blackness of darkness and ruin, so had a prophet divided it against itself.  Wallingham, still in the Cabinet, was going up and down the country trying not to explain too much.  There was division in the Cabinet, sore travail among private members.  The conception being ministerial, the Opposition applied itself to the task of abortion, fearing the worst if it should be presented to the country fully formed and featured, the smiling offspring of progress and imagination.  Travellers to Greater Britain returned waving joyous torches in the insular fog; they shed a brilliance and infectious enthusiasm, but there were not enough to do more than make the fog visible.  Many persons found such torches irritating.  They pointed out that as England had groped to her present greatness she might be trusted to feel her way further.  “Free trade,” they said, “has made us what we are.  Put out these lights!”