Suddenly Peter, who had a conscience somewhere, felt a pang in it, and, to ease it, regretfully left the corner and wandered about among his uncle's friends, being pleasant and telling them the time. He did that till the last of them had departed. Urquhart then had to depart also, and Peter was alone with his relatives. It was only after Urquhart had gone that Peter realised fully what a very curious and incongruous element he had been in the room. Realising it suddenly, he laughed, and Lucy laughed too. Felicity looked at them indulgently.
"Babies. What's the matter now?"
"Only Denis," explained Peter.
"That young man," commented Dermot Hope, without approbation, "is remarkably well-fed, well-bred, and well-dressed. Why do you take him about with you?"
"That's just why, isn't it, Peter," put in Lucy. "Peter and I like people to be well-fed and well-bred and well-dressed."
Felicity touched her chin, with her indulgent smile.
"Baby again. You like no such thing. You'd get tired of it in a week."
"Oh, well," said Lucy, "a week's a long time."
"He's got no fire in all his soul and body," complained Dermot Hope. "He's a symbol of prosperous content—of all we're fighting. It's people like him who are the real obstructionists; the people who don't see, not because they're blind, but because they're too pleased with their own conditions to look beyond them. It's people like him who are pouring water on the fires as they are lit, because fires are such bad form, and might burn up their precious chattels if allowed to get out of hand. Take life placidly; don't get excited, it's so vulgar; that's their religion. They've neither enthusiasm nor imagination in them. And so ..."
And so forth, just as it came out in "Progress" once a month. Peter didn't read "Progress," because he wasn't interested in the future, being essentially a child of to-day. Besides, he too hated conflagrations, thinking the precious chattels they would burn up much too precious for that. Peter was no lover either of destruction or construction; perhaps he too was an obstructionist; though not without imagination. His uncle knew he had a regrettable tendency to put things in the foreground and keep ideas very much in the background, and called him therefore a phenomenalist. Lucy shared this tendency, being a good deal of an artist and nothing at all of a philosopher.