He was a bluff, honest, stock-broking Briton who fancied pigeons and bred greyhounds for coursing, and cared less for literature and art than does the equally honest Mrs.Marigold in my kitchen.

But his wife and her sisters led what they called the intellectual life.
They regarded it as a heritage from their pompous ass of a father.

Of course they were not eighteen-sixty, or even eighteen-eighty.

They prided themselves on developing the hereditary tradition of culture to its extreme modern expression.

They were of the semi-intellectual type of idiot--and, if it destroys it, the great war will have some justification--which professes to find in the dull analysis of the drab adultery and suicide of a German or Scandinavian rabbit-picker a supreme expression of human existence.