in particular Mr. Britling found his real ideas inexpressible, to Mr.
Direck and to Mr. Van der Pant.

Each of these gentlemen brought with him the implication or the
intimation of a critical attitude towards England. It was all very well
for Mr. Britling himself to be critical of England; that is an
Englishman's privilege. To hear Mr. Van der Pant questioning British
efficiency or to suspect Mr. Direck of high, thin American superiorities
to war, was almost worse than to hear Mrs. Harrowdean saying hostile
things about Edith. It roused an even acuter protective emotion.

In the case of Mr. Van der Pant matters were complicated by the
difficulty of the language, which made anything but the crudest
statements subject to incalculable misconception.

Mr. Van der Pant had not the extreme tactfulness of his so typically
Catholic wife; he made it only too plain that he thought the British
postal and telegraph service slow and slack, and the management of the
Great Eastern branch lines wasteful and inefficient. He said the workmen
in the fields and the workmen he saw upon some cottages near the
junction worked slowlier and with less interest than he had ever seen
any workman display in all his life before. He marvelled that Mr.
Britling lit his house with acetylene and not electric light. He thought
fresh eggs were insanely dear, and his opinion of Matching's Easy
pig-keeping was uncomplimentary. The roads, he said, were not a means of
getting from place to place, they were a _dédale_; he drew derisive maps
with his finger on the table-cloth of the lane system about the Dower
House. He was astonished that there was no Café in Matching's Easy; he
declared that the "public house" to which he went with considerable
expectation was no public house at all; it was just a sly place for