"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.




CHAPTER IV

THE COMPLETE SHOPPER


Six months later Peter called at the Hopes' to say good-bye before he