Lionel talked much of soldiering. The Squire nodded portentously, not quite at his ease. He wanted his boy to be “keen.” At the same time, soldiering with Lionel was intended to be a means rather than an end. For five pleasant years Sir Geoffrey had served in the Brigade of Guards. Straitened fortunes had prevented the Squire from putting his son into his old regiment, but he had no regrets about that. Foreign service had done the trick. Nevertheless, the time was coming swiftly when the boy must take up other interests and responsibilities. An infusion of pipeclay was in his marrow. Pomfrets had served their sovereigns by land and sea, but the heir of the family—in his opinion—could render better service on his own land. For the moment he kept such thoughts to himself. Lady Pomfret went upstairs at eleven. The Squire and Lionel sat together till after midnight. Alone with his son, the father—not a man of great perspicacity—became oddly sensible of the change which the mother had divined so quickly. Obviously, Lionel did not see eye to eye with his senior upon certain matters. To the Squire, need it be said, life generally, his life, was a cut-and-dried affair. He believed devoutly in his own order; he detested perplexing compromises; a thing b’ Jove! was right or wrong. Being an ardent fox-hunter, an ex-master of hounds, he pursued his objectives without much regard for obstacles, although he availed himself of gaps in stiff fences. And till very lately he had ridden first-class horses—which makes a tremendous difference to a man’s “going.” Lionel, he perceived, had a touch of the “trimmer” in him. When the Squire—as was inevitable—spoke of the increasing troubles of the landed gentry, Lionel was not disposed to take for granted, what the Squire did, that the landowners were the unhappy victims of circumstance and democratic tendency. The boy hinted unmistakably that even county potentates had something to learn about organisation and economy. He spoke incisively of his own profession, tactfully shifting the ground from Wiltshire to India. “We have to work harder,” he remarked cheerfully. “But we don’t yet work hard enough. We shall find that out if there is a big row and we come up against fellows who work harder than we do.” “Um!” Lionel continued with more diffidence: “It seems to me, father, that it is always a case of the survival of the fittest. If the landed gentry can’t hold their own, they’ll be scrapped.” “Good God!” “You can’t get away from it. There it is.” “Scrapped! What a word!” “Beastly. But, as I said just now, some neighbours of ours, your own intimate friends, are tackling jobs they don’t understand. You stick to the old acres. Do they? And take your own case and mine. Is life in a jolly regiment really the right training for a man who must make his land pay or go under?” “Do you want to leave the Rifle Brigade and go to an Agricultural College?”