“And about the House of Lords?” he asked.
“My dear, you are not a professor, and I am not an undergraduate. You ask that as if you were trying to examine me, and determine my place by the intelligence of my answers. That is the fault of your party, which is the same as mine. The Government are like school-masters: they don’t seem to recollect that they were elected by the school itself. You are—to adopt Gracie’s horrid phrase—aristocratic, and you can’t understand that nowadays there is no aristocracy. I suppose I belong to it, but I am quite certain that it doesn’t exist. We are like things in the Red King’s dream. When he wakes we shall all find that there aren’t any of us. Why should there be? As you said yourself, that which the House of Lords used to represent has gone elsewhere. Germans and Jews and Hittites—whatever they are—have got it. The House of Lords is an Aunt Sally, and everybody throws darts at its silly face. And they stick there every time.”
He wrinkled his pince-nez off his nose again.
“My dear Helen,” he said, “I had no idea you were such a Radical.”
She gave a little despairing sigh.
“I am nothing of the kind!” she said. “I am no more a Radical than I am a Tory. But I do know this, that in some weird way the whole world is going into a melting-pot. We’re all going to be chucked in. What sort of soup shall we make, I wonder?”
Lord Thorley, who had sunk back into his chair, sat a little more upright, and grasped the lapels of his coat in his hands.
“Without calling attention to the fact that soup is not usually made in a melting-pot,” he observed, “I don’t believe in the melting-pot. Ever since I can remember the country has supposedly been on the verge of some gigantic cataclysm. At one time it has been socialism, at another a European war, at another Home Rule. At no period that I can remember has there not been some terrible thunder-cloud in the sky, and now I have seen too many thunder-clouds to believe in thunder. And if you look at a book of memoirs of whatever age, you will always find precisely the same thing. The writers invariably represent their country as on the edge of an abyss. The ground is always trembling with subterranean menaces. But when was the volcano actually in a state of eruption in England? It never has been. It has smoked and steamed sometimes; that has always been its safety-valve.”
He looked serenely, triumphantly, at his companions, as if, in the character of a teacher, he had algebraically “proved” some problem, or as if, in the character of a conjuror, he had brought off some clever piece of manipulation. But Lady Grote shook her head at him.
“You think you can prove things by a theory,” she said. “But unfortunately experience can disprove your theory.”