It was good fun for a time, and Old Mole was really interested. Here on the top of English life, its head and front--for the great-leisured governing classes no longer governed; they had feudal possessions but not the feudal political power--was a little world whizzing like a zoetrope. You might peep through the chinks and the figures inside it would seem to be alive, but when you were inside it there were just a number of repetitions of the same figures in poses disintegrated from movement. The machine whizzed round, but what was the force that moved it? Impossible to enter it except by energy or some fluke that made you rich enough or famous enough for there to be flattery in your acquaintance. True, Old Mole only saw the figures inside the machine arranged for pleasure. They were workers, too, but their pleasure was a part of their work. Lawyers who were working eighteen hours a day could find time to visit three great entertainments in an evening; politicians after an all-night sitting in the House could dine out, see two acts of the Opera, or the ballet, or an hour or so of a revue, and then return to the division Lobbies; actors, after two performances in the day, could come on to a reception at midnight and eat caviare and drink champagne. There were very few of whom it could be said that the rout was the breath of their nostrils; but all continued in it, all accepted it as a normal condition of things, as the proper expression of the nation's finest energies. Impossible to avoid it, furtherance of ambition and young devotion to an ideal both led to it. . . . Pitchforked into it so suddenly, with so many vivid impressions after wanderings, Old Mole felt how completely it was cut off from the life of the country, because from the inside and the outside of the machine things looked so entirely different. He had to go no further than his own case. On all hands he heard it said so often that "Lossie Loses" was a wonderful play--"so delicate, so fanciful, so full of the poetry of common things"--that it needed only a very little weakening of his critical faculty for him to begin to believe it and greedily to accept the position it had given him. As it was, knowing its intrinsic falsehood and baseness, he marveled that people of so much intelligence could be bemused by success into such jockeying of their standards. But he began to perceive that there were no standards, neither of life nor of art. There could not be, for there was no time for valuation, just as there was no time for thinking. Here and there he found an ideal or two, but such wee, worn, weary little things, so long bandied about among brains that could not understand them and worried into a decline by the shoddy rhetorical company they had been forced to keep. Arguing from his own case, Old Mole came to the conclusion that the whole whirligig had come about from a constant succession of decent ordinary mortals having been,