Utopia for the common people: they wished to realize their
favorite fictions and poems in their own lives; and, when they
could, they lived without scruple on incomes which they did
nothing to earn. The women in their girlhood made themselves look
like variety theatre stars, and settled down later into the types
of beauty imagined by the previous generation of painters. They
took the only part of our society in which there was leisure for
high culture, and made it an economic, political and; as far as
practicable, a moral vacuum; and as Nature, abhorring the vacuum,
immediately filled it up with sex and with all sorts of refined
pleasures, it was a very delightful place at its best for moments
of relaxation. In other moments it was disastrous. For prime
ministers and their like, it was a veritable Capua.



Horseback Hall

But where were our front benchers to nest if not here? The
alternative to Heartbreak House was Horseback Hall, consisting of
a prison for horses with an annex for the ladies and gentlemen
who rode them, hunted them, talked about them, bought them and
sold them, and gave nine-tenths of their lives to them, dividing
the other tenth between charity, churchgoing (as a substitute for
religion), and conservative electioneering (as a substitute for
politics). It is true that the two establishments got mixed at
the edges. Exiles from the library, the music room, and the
picture gallery would be found languishing among the stables,
miserably discontented; and hardy horsewomen who slept at the
first chord of Schumann were born, horribly misplaced, into the