This then was it--the New World and the human creatures who were to build it, the unborn as well as those now in their cradles or tottering in their first step on the pathway leading to the place of building.

Yet he himself had no thought of there being any touch of heroic splendour in his way of looking at it.

He was not capable of drama.

Behind his shut doors of immovability and stiff coldness, behind his cynic habit of treating all things with detached lightness, the generations and the centuries had continued their work in spite of his modernity.

His British obstinacy would not relinquish the long past he and his had seemed to _own_ in representing it.