If our easy-going ways hampered a hard efficiency, they did at least
develop humour and humanity. Our diplomacy at any rate had not failed
us....

He did not believe a word of this stuff. His deep irrational love for
England made him say these things.... For years he had been getting
himself into hot water because he had been writing and hinting just such
criticisms as Mr. Van der Pant expressed so bluntly.... But he wasn't
going to accept foreign help in dissecting his mother....

And another curious effect that Mr. Van der Pant had upon Mr. Britling
was to produce an obstinate confidence about the war and the nearness
of the German collapse. He would promise Mr. Van der Pant that he should
be back in Antwerp before May; that the Germans would be over the Rhine
by July. He knew perfectly well that his ignorance of all the military
conditions was unqualified, but still he could not restrain himself from
this kind of thing so soon as he began to speak Entente
Cordiale--Anglo-French, that is to say. Something in his relationship to
Mr. Van der Pant obliged him to be acutely and absurdly the protecting
British.... At times he felt like a conscious bankrupt talking off the
hour of disclosure. But indeed all that Mr. Britling was trying to say
against the difficulties of a strange language and an alien temperament,
was that the honour of England would never be cleared until Belgium was
restored and avenged....

While Mr. Britling was patrolling unimportant roads and entertaining Mr.
Van der Pant with discourses upon the nearness of victory and the subtle
estimableness of all that was indolent, wasteful and evasive in English
life, the war was passing from its first swift phases into a slower,