He paused on the terrace and looked up at the perpendicular lines of the imitation Tudor facade, dim and impressive in the half-darkness. Yet, the very house itself was a sham, an anachronism. The Tudors had been autocrats and the principles of autocracy were out of date. Even wealth was no longer the power it had once been. The rich were threatened on every side, by taxation from above and the increasing clamour and power of labour from below. They had lost prestige and influence....
Arthur Woodroffe felt remarkably full of vigour that evening, confident in the knowledge of his own abilities, and delightfully aware of his glorious independence. When he reflected on the lives of the Kenyons he at once despised and pitied them for their insane worship of wealth. He thought of them as poor trammelled creatures, as vultures that had lost the power of flight.
VI
VI
When Arthur had been five weeks at Hartling, he believed that he knew the other inmates of the house as well as he would ever know them, although he had to admit to himself that he knew none of them any better, now, than he had after he had been there three days. His social relations with some of the Kenyons had lost formality. He was familiar in his treatment of Hubert, on terms of impudence with Elizabeth, and of occasional persiflage with Joe Kenyon and Charles Turner. But these intimacies were only such as he might have developed in a month's stay with them at the same hotel. On both sides there was an effect of enforced toleration, of making the best of a casual temporarily unavoidable proximity. He was still some one who had come in from the "outside." The Kenyons never snubbed him, but he could not be quite at his ease with them; he knew that if for any reason he left Hartling, the whole family would become for him the chance acquaintances of a prolonged visit. He could see himself, a few months hence, meeting one of them in the street, pausing to exchange a few conventional inquiries, and passing on with no more than a whimsical smile at a recollection of an old adventure.
There was, however, one exception. If the descendants of old Mr Kenyon had not emerged from the indeterminate background of humanity in general, the old man himself stood out as a distinctive, even a slightly impressive figure. Arthur's original inclination, to pity the head of the house, had been gradually diverted; he was not on closer acquaintance, a figure that called for pity; and once or twice Arthur had had a strange sensation that was almost akin to fear. There was, indeed, something about old Kenyon that was not quite human, something more than that indescribable appearance of immortal old age. He appeared so intimidatingly detached from the common cares and interests of human life. He had boasted of his power to keep in touch with contemporary movements and affairs, but he was never disturbed by them. Nearly every morning Arthur spent an hour in the old man's company, and in that time he usually discussed the morning's news, but never as yet, had Arthur seen him display the least emotion with regard to any question of politics or finance. He would speak of the Irish situation, the starvation of Austria, the threat of labour troubles, the cost of living, or the burden of the Income Tax as if they were incidents in the reign of George IV. rather than in that of George V. And if Arthur himself gave any sign of heat or partisanship the old man would regard him with the cold speculative eye of one who watches the lives and furies of infusoria under a microscope. He seemed to have completely lost the warm-blooded human passion for interference in other people's affairs.