Mr. Flaggon did not smoke, neither did he drink; but he was placed in the easiest of the study chairs, next to the fireplace, and the colleagues lit their pipes and arranged themselves in a semicircle round the empty grate. There is always something singularly dispiriting about an empty grate on a wet summer evening, and a semicircular formation round it emphasises its forlornness. The colleagues were conscious of a feeling of constraint. After all that they had been saying and thinking about him in the past week, they were shy of being over-cordial to their new chief, and some of them felt a little as if they were taking part in a conspiracy, engineered by Chowdler, to exploit the inexperience of the new man. Mr. Flaggon, for his part, did not possess the easy manner and command of small talk which put strangers at their ease. Though anxious to be friendly, he was by nature reticent, one of those who, in new surroundings, are more disposed to receive impressions than to create them. So, after a little desultory talk about the golf links, and several ineffective openings that led into blind alleys, the conversation suddenly expired, and the colleagues found themselves gazing desperately at three iron bars and some unhealthy-looking green and yellow paper behind them. This was the psychological moment for Mr. Chowdler. Hitherto he had been busy pouring out whisky-and-sodas and struggling with a refractory pipe; but he now sat down opposite the guest of the evening and opened the main attack. “I suppose,” he began, “that you have been hearing a good deal to-day about our great headmaster Dr. Lanchester. Have you ever studied his life?” “I have indeed,” replied Mr. Flaggon; “in fact, it was one of the first books that excited my interest in public school education. It might, no doubt, have been better written; but it is, in its way, I think, one of the most suggestive books in the English language.” “Oh, I’m so glad to hear you say that!” cried Mr. Chowdler. “I’m so glad to hear you say that; because you know, we cling very, _very_ faithfully here to our past and our great Conservative tradition.” “Aren’t you forgetting,” said Mr. Flaggon quickly, “that Dr. Lanchester was always considered a Radical?” Mr. Chowdler _had_ forgotten; all Chiltern was in the habit of forgetting this unpleasant fact. But he would not own to any lapse of memory, and his voice took on a note of challenge as he replied: “Oh, a name doesn’t frighten _me_; there’s nothing in a name; names are only the coinage of the foolish. Lanchester was a man of very Conservative instincts. He was not one of those who love change for change’s sake. He was a restorer, not a destroyer.” “It must be difficult to be the one without the other,” remarked Mr. Flaggon quietly; “and I have always heard that Dr. Lanchester was both.”