Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/192

THE AWKWARD AGE not supposed at the moment—in the forties and the fifties—that he passed for old-fashioned, but life couldn't have left him so far in the rear had the start between them originally been fair. This was the way that, more than once, he had put the matter to the girl: which gives a sufficient hint, it is hoped, of the range of some of their talk. It had always wound up indeed, their talk, with some assumption of the growth of his actual understanding; but it was just these pauses in the fray that seemed to lead from time to time to a sharper clash. It was when he felt, in a word, as if he had exhausted surprises that he received his greatest shocks. There were no such strange tastes as some of those drawn from the bucket that had repeatedly, as he imagined, touched the bottom of the well. "Now this sudden invasion of somebody's—Heaven knows whose—house, and our dropping down on it like a swarm of locusts: I dare say it isn't civil to criticise it when one's going too, so almost culpably, with the stream; but what are people made of that they consent, just for money, to the violation of their homes?"

Nanda wondered; she cultivated the sense that he made her intensely reflect. "But haven't people in England always let their places?"

"If we're a nation of shopkeepers, you mean, it can't date, on the scale on which we show it, only from last week? No doubt, no doubt, and the more one thinks of it the more one seems to see that society—for we're in society, aren't we, and that's our horizon?—can never have been anything but increasingly vulgar. The point is that in the twilight of time—and I belong, you see, to the twilight—it had made out much less how vulgar it could be. It did its best, very probably, but there were too many superstitions it had to get rid of. It has been throwing them overboard one by one, so that now the ship sails uncommonly light. That's the way"—and the 182