"Nor the knaveries of men who seek power through dividing the country into classes, and setting each at the other's throat."
"Nor must we ever again allow the nation's security, economic or military, to be hurled into the cockpit of Party politics."
"Gad! It makes me shiver when I think how near—how near——"
"We were to destruction," added Sir Andrew gravely.
It was again a moment of intense thought. Each man was regarding from his own view-point that intangible threat inspired by the unsatisfactory termination of the war, which left the Teutonic races in a position to brew further mischief with which to flood the world.
The pucker of thought, the drawn brows, completed the likeness of Sir Andrew Farlow to England's national symbolic figure. His broad shoulders and shortish figure; his round, strong, Yorkshire face, with its crowning of snow-white, curly hair, and the old-fashioned, crisp side whiskers made him a typical John Bull, even in his modern evening dress.
In the case of his son Ruxton it was almost in every respect an antithesis.
No foreigner would have taken Ruxton Farlow for anything but an Englishman, just as no Englishman but would have charged him with possessing foreign blood in his veins. And the Englishman would have been right.
Sir Andrew Farlow had spent a brief married life of a few months over one year with one of the most beautiful women amongst the Russian nobility, and the birth of his son left him a widower.
From his mother young Ruxton had inherited all those characteristics which foreign Europe assigns to the British born; his great size, his fair, waving hair and his darkly serious eyes. These things all came from his Russian mother, who had possessed them herself in a marked degree. Furthermore he inherited other qualities which could never be claimed for his Yorkshire father. The boy from his earliest childhood was an idealist: an idealist of but a single purpose which developed into a brilliant specimen of the modern product of an old-fashioned patriotism.