Mr. Britling ignored this personal application. "What is far more serious than a food shortage is the possibility of a money panic." He paced the lawn with her and talked. He said that even now very few people realised the flimsiness of the credit system by which the modern world was sustained. It was a huge growth of confidence, due very largely to the uninquiring indolence of--everybody. It was sound so long as mankind did, on the whole, believe in it; give only a sufficient loss of faith and it might suffer any sort of collapse. It might vanish altogether--as the credit system vanished at the breaking up of Italy by the Goths--and leave us nothing but tangible things, real property, possession nine points of the law, and that sort of thing. Did she remember that last novel of Gissing's?--"Veranilda," it was called. It was a picture of the world when there was no wealth at all except what one could carry hidden or guarded about with one. That sort of thing came to the Roman Empire slowly, in the course of lifetimes, but nowadays we lived in a rapider world--with flimsier institutions. Nobody knew the strength or the weakness of credit; nobody knew whether even the present shock might not send it smashing down.... And then all the little life we had lived so far would roll away.... Mrs. Britling, he noted, glanced ever and again at her sunlit house--there were new sunblinds, and she had been happy in her choice of a colour--and listened with a sceptical expression to this disquisition. "A few days ago," said Mr. Britling, trying to make things concrete for her, "you and I together were worth five-and-twenty thousand pounds. Now we don't know what we are worth; whether we have lost a thousand or ten thousand...." He examined his sovereign purse and announced he had six pounds. "What have you?" She had about eighteen pounds in the house. "We may have to get along with that for an indefinite time." "But the bank will open again presently," she said. "And people about here trust us." "Suppose they don't?" She did not trouble about the hypothesis. "And our investments will recover. They always do recover." "Everything may recover," he admitted. "But also nothing may recover. All this life of ours which has seemed so settled and secure--isn't secure. I have felt that we were fixed here and rooted--for all our lives. Suppose presently things sweep us out of it? It's a possibility we may have to face. I feel this morning as if two enormous gates had opened in our lives, like the gates that give upon an arena, gates giving on a darkness--through which anything might come. Even death. Suppose suddenly we were to see one of those great Zeppelins in the air, or hear the thunder of guns away towards the coast. And if a messenger came upon a bicycle telling us to leave everything and go inland...." "I see no reason why one should go out to meet things like that." "But there is no reason why one should not envisage them...."