The coming of the Montgomeryites acted instantaneously. Within an hour of their issuing from their sixty-bedroom hotel, the Cambrians and their deck-chairs and bathing-tents had drawn a little more compactly together on the sands. Certainly the Cambrians did not see why they should take, intellectually, a second place to these loftily and botanically thinking ones, merely because they chose to pay a little attention to appearances also. Moreover, the fact that the Reading Party had come to Llanyglo only for a fortnight filled the Briggses and the Laceys with a certain compassion. This was not compassion that the ecstacies with which a zoophyte was discovered, or the glad cries with which a bit of sundew was hailed, must be such transient joys. It was rather compassion that the Montgomeryites should find the place pristine. Llanyglo "pristine"--now!... "Ah," they thought, "they wouldn't think that if they'd known it as _we_ knew it--two houses and a single hotel only!" ... The thought opened a vista. Perhaps, in time to come, these Utopians would tell others how, when _they_ first set eyes on Llanyglo, the place had not begun to be spoiled, but had had three hotels only, a dozen or so houses, Ham-and-Egg Terrace, and a blackboard here and there that had emphasised rather than detracted from its virgin charm. And these others would pass it on to others still, and so it would go on, and so, in one sense, Llanyglo would never grow. There would always be somebody who had known it before somebody else, and would say, "Ah, yes, but you ought to have seen it _then_!" ... Well, thought the Cambrians, perhaps it was a good thing. To have inferiors is one of the great solaces of Life, and they supposed that the Tophams also had their inferiors. Perhaps some day a tripper would look even on Philip Lacey's Floral Valley with much the same shock of delight with which Eve opened her eyes on the dew of Eden.... A sorely tried man now was Philip. Sadly he lamented the evening that had taken him and Barry Topham to the same Philharmonic Concert in Liverpool. For the starched and hotpressed ones of the "Cambrian," though they did not openly say so, held him as in a manner responsible for this inferior spilling all over their idyllic place. They seemed to be trying to make out that the Tophams were Philip's chosen friends. Philip felt this to be unfair. It was an accident that might have happened to anybody, and Philip's views on culture and the multitude were every bit as sound as Raymond Briggs's own. And as Philip did not intend to be sat upon by Raymond Briggs or anybody, he acted well, nay, even nobly. He had recognised Topham; very well. He had not positively encouraged the fellow, but say that certain narrow-minded persons wished to make it appear that he had done so; well again. He would stand by what he had done. He would ask the Tophams to dinner at his hotel.