At the beginning the child is reared under the shadow of Bladesover, under the dominance of the great house, in the feudal tradition seen from the underside. And here was a civilisation which could be approved or condemned, but which at least stood as a coherent thing--a rule of life, a code of conduct, an organic society. But as he grows to manhood, Bladesover is sinking into decay, perishing, not knowing that it is perishing, thinking that it will endure for ever. The man who is living amid that long-drawn decline is wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born. It is an age in passing. What is coming to replace it? No one knows. The religion, the moral affirmations and denials of Bladesover are vanishing with it. Like the great house, the outward seeming still maintains an appearance of life; still church steeple and feudal tower together dominate the countryside. But the inner heart of it has gone. Man, as he achieves maturity, as he achieves sincerity from the rubbish heap of dead and dying assertions and denials in which he is being upreared, finds himself naked and alone in the midst of all the clamour and violence of encompassing hordes of his fellows. No pillar of cloud by day, no pillar of fire by night, directs his onward journey. And the irony of the experience is provided by the fact that the moment of the apprehension of this loneliness is the moment also of the apprehension of magnificence in material achievement--when civilisation, intoxicated with the attainment of comfort, is crowning itself with flowers and calling itself immortal. The effect is similar to that of the splendour of a palace which is found to be designed by a madman. It is a “new hotel population” revealed as the ascendant race: the “multitude of economically ascendant people who are learning how to spend money.” They are “running the world, practically, running it faster and faster.” Of the fate of such an Age the hero here makes no prophecy. The sadness of his frustrated life, the denial of the only thing in life that he passionately desires, fills the whole scene with the sense of baffled purposes, of a striving that ends in nothing. “It may be,” he confesses at the end, “I see decay all about me because I am, in a sense, decay. To others it may be a scene of achievement and construction radiant with hope. I, too, have a sort of hope, but it is a remote hope, a hope that finds no promise in this Empire or in any of the great things of our time. How they will look in history I do not know.”[22]