Quietly, evenly, the years slid by. The boy became a youth and the youth a man; and, in a modest way, the man prospered, becoming the most important person, next to its proprietor, in the estate agent's business. The mother's life became easier, and the sister (who had become a school-teacher) owed many little comforts and pleasures to the consistent kindliness of one who now was admittedly the head of the little household and its chief provider. He never gave a thought to the State or felt the smallest kind of interest in politics; yet his life was in no way self-centred or selfish, but, on the contrary, one in which the chief motive was the service of those nearest and dearest to him. Whilst rarely looking inward, his outward vision was bounded by the horizon of his well-ordered little home, of the Home Counties he had learned to love, and of the south-coast seaside village in which the family spent a happy fortnight every summer. They were in that little seaside village when the Huns decreed war and desolation for Europe in August, 1914, and the three were a good deal upset about the whole business, for it interfered with the railway service, and broke in very unpleasantly upon the holiday atmosphere, which, coming as it did for but one fortnight in each year, was exceedingly precious to the little family. However, with the Englishman's instinct for clinging to the established order, with all the national hatred of disturbance, they clung as far as possible to the measured pleasantness of their holiday routine, and, after a week, returned to the workaday round of life in Brixton. Then began a time of peculiar stress and anxiety for the little household, the dominating factor in which was the growing strangeness, as it seemed to them, of its actual head and ruler; of the man in the house. At first he talked a great deal of the war, the overpowering news of the day, and he passed many scathing criticisms upon the conduct of the authorities in their handling of the first stages of the monstrous work of preparation. He had much to say of their blunders and oversights; and somewhat, too, of what he called their criminal unpreparedness. He stopped talking rather abruptly at breakfast one morning; and one of the headlines which subsequently caught the eyes of his sister, in the newspaper her brother had propped against the coffee-pot, put this inquiry, in bold black type: "WHOSE FAULT IS IT, MR. CITIZEN, THAT THE COUNTRY IS UTTERLY UNPREPARED FOR WAR?"