_O. HENRY MEMORIAL AWARD PRIZE STORIES 1919_



ENGLAND TO AMERICA


By MARGARET PRESCOTT MONTAGUE

From _Atlantic Monthly_


I.

"Lord, but English people are funny!"

This was the perplexed mental ejaculation that young Lieutenant
Skipworth Cary, of Virginia, found his thoughts constantly reiterating
during his stay in Devonshire. Had he been, he wondered, a confiding
fool, to accept so trustingly Chev Sherwood's suggestion that he spend a
part of his leave, at least, at Bishopsthorpe, where Chev's people
lived? But why should he have anticipated any difficulty here, in this
very corner of England which had bred his own ancestors, when he had
always hit it off so splendidly with his English comrades at the Front?
Here, however, though they were all awfully kind,--at least, he was sure
they meant to be kind,--something was always bringing him up short:
something that he could not lay hold of, but which made him feel like a
blind man groping in a strange place, or worse, like a bull in a
china-shop. He was prepared enough to find differences in the American
and English points of view. But this thing that baffled him did not seem