No gathering of this sort could be found in a city, nor in many countries outside England, where the land is loved, and lived on, by those who could centre themselves elsewhere if they chose. To the Graftons, as new-comers, the people gathered here from a radius of some miles were beginning to be known in the actualities of their lives as acquaintances in London never could be known, except those who could be called friends. Each of them represented something recognised and fixed, which gave them an interest and an atmosphere. They belonged here and there, and their belongings coloured them, more perhaps even than their characters or achievements. Achievement, indeed, was scarcely represented. There were two members of the House of Lords, neither of whom ever visited that assembly, and a member of the House of Commons, who never spoke there if he could possibly help it. There were a few undistinguished barristers, and some as yet undistinguished soldiers. To the world outside the circle to which these people mostly belonged, scarcely a name represented there would have been familiar; and yet in a similar gathering anywhere in England the names of many of them would have been known, and would have meant something. What they would have meant, among other things, if worked back to beginnings, would have been the ownership of England. If the people in this room, most of them unimportant if tested by their capacity to achieve power among their fellows by unaided effort, had been taken as a centre, and the circle widened, and widened again by the inclusion of all those related by birth or marriage, it would eventually have covered all but a spot here and there of the map of the United Kingdom, and the great mass of the inhabitants of these islands would have been left outside. In charging the whole of this particular assembly with a notable absence of achievement, exception must be made for the Bishop of the Diocese, who was there, however, as a visitor, not being in the habit of attending such gatherings of his flock in his pastoral capacity. Even he might not have reached his gaitered eminence if he had not belonged by birth to the sort of people represented here, for, in spite of the democratisation of the Church, the well-born clergyman, if he follows the lines of promotion and is not noticeably lacking in ability, still has a slight 'pull.'