“It’s like this. If Harriet catches me smoking here in the morning there’ll be a row.” He picked up the trowel and waved it. “Nearly the whole of our class in England has, ever since the beginning of last century, been happily asleep. It isn’t good for people to have a woman on the throne for sixty years—bless her all the same, _and_ her making a success of it. So we’ve slept and slept and slept. The Old Lady died. There was the Boer War: there were motorcars, flying machines, telephones. Suddenly England was an island no longer. She’s _got_ to pay attention to other people, other ideas, other customs. She’s _got_ to look out of her window instead of just snoozing on the sofa, surrounded by her mid-Victorian furniture. Everything’s cracking: new classes are coming up, old classes are going down. Birth is nothing: autocracies are anachronisms.... A volcano’s coming. Everything will be blown sky-high. Then the folk who are left will build a new city—as bad, as stupid, as selfish as the old one, perhaps—but different ... as different as Garth from China and China from Paradise.” “And Katherine and Philip?” said Rachel. “Oh, young Mark’s just one of the advance-guard. He’s smashing up the Trenchards with his hammer—the same way that all the families like us up and down England are being smashed up. If it isn’t a young man from abroad, it’s a letter or a book or a telephone number or a photograph or a suicide or a Lyceum melodrama. It doesn’t matter what it is. The good old backbone of England has got spine disease. When your good grandmother died _your_ lot went; now _our_ lot is going.... When I say going I mean changing.” “There was a funny little man,” said Rachel, “whom Uncle John used to know. I forget his name, but he talked in the same way when grandmother died, and prophesied all kinds of things. The world hasn’t seemed very different since then, but grandmother was an impossible survival, and _her_ lot went, all of them, long before she did. All the same, if you’ll forgive me, I don’t think that England and possible volcanoes are the point for the moment. It’s Katie I’m thinking about. If she’s unhappy now what will she be after she’s married to him?—If Katie were to make an unhappy marriage, I think it would be the greatest sorrow of my life. I know ... I’ve known ... how easily things can go wrong.”