When he saw them bring their
spirit-lamps and kettles and sit down in little companies
on four square yards of turf, under the blackened branches,
in the roar of the traffic, he went back to Bloomsbury
to pack his trunk, glad that it was not his lot to live
with that enduring spectacle.
They were all glad, every one of them, to turn their
faces to the West again. The unready conception of things,
the political concentration upon parish affairs, the
cumbrous social machinery, oppressed them with its dull
anachronism in a marching world; the problems of sluggish
overpopulation clouded their eager outlook. These conditions
might have been their inheritance. Perhaps Lorne Murchison
was the only one who thanked Heaven consciously that it
was not so; but there was no man among them whose pulse
did not mark a heart rejoiced as he paced the deck of
the Allan liner the first morning out of Liverpool,
because he had leave to refuse them. None dreamed of
staying, of "settling," though such a course was practicable
to any of them except Lorne. They were all rich enough
to take the advantages that money brings in England, the
comfort, the importance, the state; they had only to add
their wealth to the sumptuous side of the dramatic
contrast. I doubt whether the idea even presented itself.
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