He did feel, if not yet a dodo, at least at the end of something; he did feel, looking round the room in which the watery light filtering through the beech leaves and reflecting the river gave everything a soft luminosity becoming to the unpainted faces of the women and the muted colour of their clothes and the blue and white of the china on the dark shelves behind them, that beyond the river and the trees, beyond the boundaries of his own estate, there was a whole clamorous violent disorderly process going on which was to bring about the end of an idea, an idea started by people whose combination of poetry and political acumen, curiosity and love of pastoral life, made them seem, he’d always thought, though Florentine, rather English. He believed – of course he believed – that Renaissance man had been best embodied in the eighteenth-century English gentleman, and it was this figure, standing in his library, a book in one hand, the other resting lightly on a piece of classical sculpture, gazing out over a landscape harmoniously ordered by himself and under his guidance his tenants, in the consciousness that from time to time he would be called upon to play a part in the government of his country or its defence, and that in due course his eldest son would take his place and stand at his library window and deal with his tenants and show his visitors the improvements – it was this figure which in Sir Randolph’s mind accorded so ill with striking industrial workers, screaming suffragettes, Irish terrorists, scandals on the Stock Exchange, universal suffrage. If the hierarchy to which he belonged were to be swept away by absolute democracy what could his son the diplomat expect to inherit? Or his grandson Marcus, the schoolboy? His imagination ran suddenly far ahead, past bankruptcy, past expropriation, past the roused rabble and the barbarian horde, to the outposts and lonely places of the world, the faint torch of truth, the wide white light of the island of Iona.

‘Now why are you smiling?’ asked Aline.

‘Because I was telling Olivia a few minutes ago my gloomy prognostications about the future, and the extraordinary thing is that sometimes when my thoughts about the future become very gloomy indeed, I find myself feeling more and more light-hearted about it. Do you find that at all?’

‘I never have gloomy thoughts about the future. I can’t afford to at my age, it would give me wrinkles.’

‘I suppose I have always rather fancied the idea of having to take to the hills.’

‘What hills? There aren’t any round here.’

‘We’re not all that far from the Chilterns. But I suppose I mean that metaphorically. Taking to the hills when barbarian hordes overrun us, that’s what I meant. I think I should enjoy it.’

‘Minnie would simply hate it. I really think taking to the hills is not at all a suitable thing for Minnie to do. She and I will just have to stay behind and try to make friends with the barbarians.’