1

The quest of Potterism, its causes and its cure, took the party of
investigation first to the Cornish coast. Partly because of bathing and
boating, and partly because Gideon, the organiser of the party, wanted to
find out if there was much Potterism in Cornwall, or if Celticism had
withstood it. For Potterism, they had decided, was mainly an Anglo-Saxon
disease. Worst of all in America, that great home of commerce, success,
and the booming of the second-rate. Less discernible in the Latin
countries, which they hoped later on to explore, and hardly existing in
the Slavs. In Russia, said Gideon, who loathed Russians, because he was
half a Jew, it practically did not exist. The Russians were without shame
and without cant, saw things as they were, and proceeded to make them a
good deal worse. That was barbarity, imbecility, and devilishness, but it
was not Potterism, said Gideon grimly. Gideon's grandparents had been
massacred in an Odessa pogrom; his father had been taken at the age of
five to England by an aunt, become naturalised, taken the name of Sidney,
married an Englishwoman, and achieved success and wealth as a banker. His
son Arthur was one of the most brilliant men of his year at Oxford,
regarded Russians, Jews, and British with cynical dislike, and had, on
turning twenty-one, reverted to his family name in its English form,
finding it a Potterish act on his father's part to have become Sidney.
Few of his friends remembered to call him by his new name, and his
parents ignored it, but to wear it gave him a grim satisfaction.

Such was Arthur Gideon, a lean-faced, black-eyed man, biting his nails
like Fagin when he got excited.