With all their aspirations to the character of typical Englishmen, Mr. Pendyce and Mr. Barter thought themselves far from the old beef and beer, port and pigskin types of the Georgian and early Victorian era.  They were men of the world, abreast of the times, who by virtue of a public school and ’Varsity training had acquired a manner, a knowledge of men and affairs, a standard of thought on which it had really never been needful to improve.  Both of them, but especially Mr. Pendyce, kept up with all that was going forward by visiting the Metropolis six or seven or even eight times a year.  On these occasions they rarely took their wives, having almost always important business in hand—­old College, Church, or Conservative dinners, cricket-matches, Church Congress, the Gaiety Theatre, and for Mr. Barter the Lyceum.  Both, too, belonged to clubs—­the Rector to a comfortable, old-fashioned place where he could get a rubber without gambling, and Mr. Pendyce to the Temple of things as they had been, as became a man who, having turned all social problems over in his mind, had decided that there was no real safety but in the past.

They always went up to London grumbling, but this was necessary, and indeed salutary, because of their wives; and they always came back grumbling, because of their livers, which a good country rest always fortunately reduced in time for the next visit.  In this way they kept themselves free from the taint of provincialism.

In the silence of his master’s study the spaniel John, whose head, too, was long and narrow, had placed it over his paw, as though suffering from that silence, and when his master cleared his throat he guttered his tail and turned up an eye with a little moon of white, without stirring his chin.

The clock ticked at the end of the long, narrow room; the sunlight through the long, narrow windows fell on the long, narrow backs of books in the glassed book-case that took up the whole of one wall; and this room, with its slightly leathery smell, seemed a fitting place for some long, narrow ideal to be worked out to its long and narrow ending.

But Mr. Pendyce would have scouted the notion of an ending to ideals having their basis in the hereditary principle.

“Let me do my duty and carry on the estate as my dear old father did, and hand it down to my son enlarged if possible,” was sometimes his saying, very, very often his thought, not seldom his prayer.  “I want to do no more than that.”

The times were bad and dangerous.  There was every chance of a Radical Government being returned, and the country going to the dogs.  It was but natural and human that he should pray for the survival of the form of things which he believed in and knew, the form of things bequeathed to him, and embodied in the salutary words “Horace Pendyce.”  It was not his habit to welcome new ideas.  A new idea invading the country of the Squire’s mind was at once met with a rising of the whole population,