discussion at the table upon questions of philosophy and aesthetics....
It is not so. When I ask him questions it is often that they are not
seriously answered. Sometimes it is as if he did not like the questions
I askt of him. Yesterday I askt of him did he agree or did he not agree
with Mr. Bernard Shaw. He just said--I wrote it down in my memoranda--he
said: 'Oh! Mixt Pickles.' What can one understand of that?--Mixt
Pickles!"...

The young man's sedulous blue eyes looked out of his pink face through
his glasses at Mr. Direck, anxious for any light he could offer upon the
atmospheric vagueness of this England.

He was, he explained, a student of philology preparing for his
doctorate. He had not yet done his year of military service. He was
studying the dialects of East Anglia--

"You go about among the people?" Mr. Direck inquired.

"No, I do not do that. But I ask Mr. Carmine and Mrs. Britling and the
boys many questions. And sometimes I talk to the gardener."

He explained how he would prepare his thesis and how it would be
accepted, and the nature of his army service and the various stages by
which he would subsequently ascend in the orderly professorial life to
which he was destined. He confessed a certain lack of interest in
philology, but, he said, "it is what I have to do." And so he was going
to do it all his life through. For his own part he was interested in
ideas of universal citizenship, in Esperanto and Ido and universal
languages and such-like attacks upon the barriers between man and man.
But the authorities at home did not favour cosmopolitan ideas, and so he