It must be so. The past and the name of such men are necessary to the grist of expansion; but expansion and the newer kind of responsibilities kill them. So doubtless Venice in the sixteenth, Spain in the seventeenth, Holland in the eighteenth centuries were compelled to use, and destroy in using, what had been their most national type. It was the price they paid for the varied glory they proceeded to achieve. My friend was a necessary sacrifice, I know; but he was my friend. The victim moves me. Consider him here in this great modern room—how much it was a torture-place for him. He and they were ending their work. That day the last stone would be laid; yet was he further than ever from repose. He and the three other men before him were now occupied in the actual work of forging a new province. The dignity of such an occasion should have touched him (he thought) more profoundly than it could his colleagues, whose lives had been spent in no other atmosphere. But, alas! unrest, most cogent, most bewildering, robbed that great occasion of any note of the solemn. Reality and unreality mixed in his mind continually. The world, so long a quite familiar thing, grew unfamiliar to him, more and more with every hour. The constraint which he felt in Mr Barnett’s presence; the certitude he had that Mr Barnett was a genius and a maker of England; the natural awe wherewith he regarded Lord Benthorpe’s experience; the astonishing phenomenon whereby Lord Benthorpe nevertheless showed himself purely passive; Harbury’s manifestly clear and decisive intelligence, coupled with his complete subservience—all these contradictions put his mind into a whirl. Full of an aged complaint, not very distant from despair, he sat him down wearily in the vacant chair set for him. It was of the kind known to the trade as “Dutch Mediæval Easy”; fashioned of American hickory so treated as to resemble old English oak, and handsomely upholstered in a green imitation of Spanish leather. He noticed Mr Harbury’s quiet, impressive face; Lord Benthorpe’s somewhat nervous ease; above all, Mr Barnett’s powerful ill-dressed figure, sitting at random, bent over the scattered papers before him; and in his heart he groaned, remembering his fortune risked, the friendship of his life in jeopardy, and his hopeless see-saw of misunderstanding. As usual, it was Mr Harbury who spoke first; as usual, he spoke rapidly and clearly. “I think, gentlemen,” he said, “there is very little for us to do ... Payleys will bank for us, as you know. Charles & Charles will naturally do our legal work. The Directors I think we know.” He smiled as he said this, a slight conventional smile which fluttered on the face of Lord Benthorpe, and died on that of Mr Burden. “All we have to do is to read over the prospectus for the last time.” He sighed, and there was a pause. Then he turned to Mr Burden, saying: “Perhaps Mr Burden can suggest something.”