Nedda sighed.  “I’m glad you think that,” she murmured, “because I don’t think it is, either.  I do so want you to like Derek, Uncle John, because—­it’s a secret from nearly every one—­he and I are engaged.”

John jerked his head up a little, as though he had received a slight blow.  The news was not palatable.  He kept his form, however, and answered: 

“Oh!  Really!  Ah!”

Nedda said still more softly:  “Please don’t judge him by the other night; he wasn’t very nice then, I know.”

John cleared his throat.

Instinct warned her that he agreed, and she said rather sadly: 

“You see, we’re both awfully young.  It must be splendid to have experience.”

Over John’s face, with its double line between the brows, its double line in the thin cheeks, its single firm line of mouth beneath a gray moustache, there passed a little grimace.

“As to being young,” he said, “that’ll change for the—­er—­better only too fast.”

What was it in this girl that reminded him of that one with whom he had lived but two years, and mourned fifteen?  Was it her youth?  Was it that quick way of lifting her eyes, and looking at him with such clear directness?  Or the way her hair grew?  Or what?

“Do you like the people here, Uncle John?”

The question caught John, as it were, between wind and water.  Indeed, all her queries seemed to be trying to incite him to those wide efforts of mind which bring into use the philosophic nerve; and it was long since he had generalized afresh about either things or people, having fallen for many years past into the habit of reaching his opinions down out of some pigeonhole or other.  To generalize was a youthful practice that one took off as one takes certain garments off babies when they come to years of discretion.  But since he seemed to be in for it, he answered rather shortly:  “Not at all.”

Nedda sighed again.

“Nor do I. They make me ashamed of myself.”

John, whose dislike of the Bigwigs was that of the dogged worker of this life for the dogged talkers, wrinkled his brows: 

“How’s that?”

“They make me feel as if I were part of something heavy sitting on something else, and all the time talking about how to make things lighter for the thing it’s sitting on.”

A vague recollection of somebody—­some writer, a dangerous one—­ having said something of this sort flitted through John.

“Do you think England is done for, Uncle—­I mean about ’the Land’?”

In spite of his conviction that ‘the country was in a bad way,’ John was deeply, intimately shocked by that simple little question.  Done for!  Never!  Whatever might be happening underneath, there must be no confession of that.  No! the country would keep its form.  The country would breathe through its nose, even if it did lose the race.  It must never know, or let others know, even if it were beaten.  And he said: