waved his arm comprehensively—­“looks as though it was bound to go on steadily forever.  It seems incredible that the system could be smashed.  It seems incredible that anything we can do will ever smash the system.  Lady Homartyn, for example, is incapable of believing that she won’t always be able to have week-end parties at Claverings, and that the letters and the tea won’t come to her bedside in the morning.  Or if her imagination goes to the point of supposing that some day she won’t be there to receive the tea, it means merely that she supposes somebody else will be.  Her pleasant butler may fear to lose his ‘situation,’ but nothing on earth could make him imagine a time when there will not be a ‘situation’ for him to lose.  Old Asquith thinks that we always have got along, and that we always shall get along by being quietly artful and saying, ‘Wait and see.’  And it’s just because we are all convinced that we are so safe against a general breakdown that we are able to be so recklessly violent in our special cases.  Why shouldn’t women have the vote? they argue.  What does it matter?  And bang goes a bomb in Westminster Abbey.  Why shouldn’t Ulster create an impossible position?  And off trots some demented Carsonite to Germany to play at treason on some half word of the German Emperor’s and buy half a million rifles....

“Exactly like children being very, very naughty....

“And,” said Mr. Britling with a gesture to round off his discourse, “we do go on.  We shall go on—­until there is a spark right into the magazine.  We have lost any belief we ever had that fundamental things happen.  We are everlasting children in an everlasting nursery....”

And immediately he broke out again.

“The truth of the matter is that hardly any one has ever yet mastered the fact that the world is round.  The world is round—­like an orange.  The thing is told us—­like any old scandal—­at school.  For all practical purposes we forget it.  Practically we all live in a world as flat as a pancake.  Where time never ends and nothing changes.  Who really believes in any world outside the circle of the horizon?  Here we are and visibly nothing is changing.  And so we go on to—­nothing will ever change.  It just goes on—­in space, in time.  If we could realise that round world beyond, then indeed we should go circumspectly....  If the world were like a whispering gallery, what whispers might we not hear now—­from India, from Africa, from Germany, warnings from the past, intimations of the future....

“We shouldn’t heed them....”

Section 6

And indeed at the very moment when Mr. Britling was saying these words, in Sarajevo in Bosnia, where the hour was somewhat later, men whispered together, and one held nervously to a black parcel that had been given him and nodded as they repeated his instructions, a black parcel with certain unstable chemicals and a curious arrangement of detonators therein, a black parcel destined ultimately to shatter nearly every landmark of Mr. Britling’s and Lady Frensham’s cosmogony....