Their activities alone must have given the modern English such cheerfulness as they possess, while the climate has made them a nation of grumblers. Perhaps the Industrial Revolution saved us from our weather. Coal and power came and gave us something to do. For what has been the history of England, but the watering of the blood of those who came to dwell in her. It is not necessary to thank the Roman rule for the decadence of the Britons, when their Saxon conquerors in turn sank into sodden, boorish ignorance. The Normans brought red blood and wine to the grey island, but by the fifteenth century the blend had become coarse, cruel, and poor. With the Elizabethans, half the world rushed into new adventure and romance, and England revived. But once again the grey island damped down the ardour, the enthusiasms and the energies of the people. During the first half of the eighteenth century, the population was stagnant, the country poor, coarse and apathetic. Then King Coal arose, and lit a fire for us, and a few great men were born. We found big things to do, and were renewed, in spite of our climate. Yet the question suggests itself, will these subtle atmospheric influences reassert themselves and damp us down once more in the centuries that are to come? Eve Carfax had elected to live in a London suburb, and had chosen Highbury, perhaps because of childish recollections of pleasant half holidays spent there with a friend of her mother’s, afternoons when muffins and fancy cakes had made bread and butter superfluous, and a jolly old lady had discovered occasional half-crowns in her purse. Eve had taken two rooms in a little red house in Bosnia Road. Why it should have been called Bosnia Road she could not imagine. Each house had a front door with stained glass and a brass letter box, a tiny strip of front garden faced with a low brick wall topped by an iron railing, an iron gate, and a red tiled path. All the houses looked exactly alike. Most of them had a big china bowl or fern pot on a table or pedestal in the window of the ground floor room. There was no originality either in the texture or the draping of the curtains. None of the houses in Bosnia Road had any of that sense of humour possessed by the houses in a village street. There were no jocular leerings, no rollicking leanings up against a neighbour, no expressive and whimsical faces. They were all decently alike, respectably uniform, staring at each other across the road, and never moved to laughter by the absurd discovery that the architect had unconsciously perpetrated a cynical lampoon upon the suburban middle classes. When one is fighting for the bare necessities of life, one is not conscious of monotony. For Eve, as an adventuress, it had been a question of gaining a foothold and a grip on a ledge with her fingers, and her energies had been concentrated on hanging to the vantage she had gained. She had had good luck, and the good luck had been due to Kate Duveen.