With spurs attached and a "chancellery" in his home, Charles Gould has fully assumed the role of conqueror, riding out to repress the same people whose condition he once intended to uplift. This is the novel's last image of Charles Gould, and in the images of the closing door "at the farther end" of the symbolic house of the material interests, and the final dying out of the spurs of conquest, I see a prophetic vision of the material interests passing from history, to be replaced by the age of socialist revolt.