Mr. Britling's talk became like a wide stream flowing through Mr.
Direck's mind, bearing along momentary impressions and observations,
drifting memories of all the crowded English sights and sounds of the
last five days, filmy imaginations about ancestral names and pretty
cousins, scraps of those prepared conversational openings on Mr.
Britling's standing in America, the explanation about the lecture club,
the still incompletely forgotten purport of the Robinson anecdote....

"Nobody planned the British estate system, nobody planned the British
aristocratic system, nobody planned the confounded constitution, it came
about, it was like layer after layer wrapping round an agate, but you
see it came about so happily in a way, it so suited the climate and the
temperament of our people and our island, it was on the whole so cosy,
that our people settled down into it, you can't help settling down into
it, they had already settled down by the days of Queen Anne, and Heaven
knows if we shall ever really get away again. We're like that little
shell the _Lingula_, that is found in the oldest rocks and lives to-day:
it fitted its easy conditions, and it has never modified since. Why
should it? It excretes all its disturbing forces. Our younger sons go
away and found colonial empires. Our surplus cottage children emigrate
to Australia and Canada or migrate into the towns. It doesn't alter
_this_...."


Section 12

Mr. Direck's eye had come to rest upon the barn, and its expression
changed slowly from lazy appreciation to a brightening intelligence.
Suddenly he resolved to say something. He resolved to say it so firmly
that he determined to say it even if Mr. Britling went on talking all