I found almost hideous. The ancient inns, for instance, adapted to
week-end motor traffic, were pretentious and uncomfortable, their
"menus" of inferior food written elaborately in French. The
courtliness had vanished, and the cost had come. Telephones
everywhere not only destroyed privacy, but brought dismay into
countless gentle intimacies, their nuisance hardly justified by their
usefulness. Life, it seemed, in a frantic hurry, had been cheapened,
not improved; there was no real progress, but only more unrest.
England--too solid to go fast, had made ungainly efforts; but she had
moved towards ungraciousness where she had moved at all; I found her
a cross between a museum and an American mushroom town that
advertises all the modern comforts with a violent insistence that is
meant to cloak their very absence.

This, my first impression, toned down, of course, a little later; but
it was my first impression. The people, however, even in the
countryside, seemed proud both of mushroom and museum, and commercial
ugliness, greedy and unashamed, now distorted every old-world
village. The natives were pleased to the point of vanity.

For myself, I could not manage this atrocious compromise, and looking
for the dear old England of our boyhood days, I found it not. The
change, of course, was not in the country only, but in myself. The
soul in me, awakened to a new standard, had turned round to face
another way.

The Manor House was very still when I arrived from London--& late May
evening between the sunset and the dark. Mother, as you know, met me
at the station, for they had stopped the down-train by special
orders, so that I stepped out upon the deserted platform of the