little out of breath. He had an air of
having been running after us since the first toot of our horn had warned
the village of our presence. He was an Oxford man, clean-shaven, with
a cadaverous complexion and a guardedly respectful manner, a cultivated
intonation, and a general air of accommodation to the new order of
things. These Oxford men are the Greeks of our plutocratic empire. He
was a Tory in spirit, and what one may call an adapted Tory by stress
of circumstances; that is to say, he was no longer a legitimist; he was
prepared for the substitution of new lords for old. We were pill vendors
he knew, and no doubt horribly vulgar in soul; but then it might have
been some polygamous Indian rajah, a great strain on a good man's tact,
or some Jew with an inherited expression of contempt. Anyhow, we were
English, and neither Dissenters nor Socialists, and he was cheerfully
prepared to do what he could to make gentlemen of both of us. He might
have preferred Americans for some reasons; they are not so obviously
taken from one part of the social system and dumped down in another, and
they are more teachable; but in this world we cannot always be choosers.
So he was very bright and pleasant with us, showed us the church,
gossiped informingly about our neighbours on the countryside--Tux, the
banker; Lord Boom, the magazine and newspaper proprietor; Lord Carnaby,
that great sportsman, and old Lady Osprey. And finally he took us by
way of a village lane--three children bobbed convulsively with eyes
of terror for my uncle--through a meticulous garden to a big, slovenly
Vicarage with faded Victorian furniture and a faded Victorian wife, who
gave us tea and introduced us to a confusing family dispersed among a
lot of disintegrating basket chairs upon the edge of a well-used tennis
lawn.

These people interested me. They were a common type, no doubt, but they
were new to me. There were two lank sons who had been playing singles
at tennis, red-eared youths growing black moustaches, and dressed in
conscientiously untidy tweeds and unbuttoned and ungirt Norfolk jackets.
There were a number of ill-nourished-looking daughters, sensible
and economical in their costume, the younger still with long,
brown-stockinged legs, and the eldest present--there were, we
discovered, one or two hidden away--displaying a large gold cross
and other aggressive ecclesiastical symbols; there were two or three
fox-terriers, a retrieverish mongrel, and a