d
away, they Anglicised quickly and cleverly. Andre grew bold and
cheerful, and lost his first distrust of his rather older English
playmates. Every day at lunch he produced a new, carefully prepared
piece of English, though for some time he retained a marked preference
for "Good morning, Saire," and "Thank you very mush," over all other
locutions, and fell back upon them on all possible and many impossible
occasions. And he could do some sleight-of-hand tricks with remarkable
skill and humour, and fold paper with quite astonishing results.
Meanwhile Mr. Van der Pant sought temporary employment in England, went
for long rides upon his bicycle, exchanged views with Mr. Britling upon
a variety of subjects, and became a wonderful player of hockey.

He played hockey with an extraordinary zest and nimbleness. Always he
played in the tail coat, and the knitted muffler was never relinquished;
he treated the game entirely as an occasion for quick tricks and
personal agility; he bounded about the field like a kitten, he
pirouetted suddenly, he leapt into the air and came down in new
directions; his fresh-coloured face was alive with delight, the coat
tails and the muffler trailed and swished about breathlessly behind his
agility. He never passed to other players; he never realised his
appointed place in the game; he sought simply to make himself a leaping
screen about the ball as he drove it towards the goal. But Andre he
would not permit to play at all, and Madame played like a lady, like a
Madonna, like a saint carrying the instrument of her martyrdom. The
game and its enthusiasms flowed round her and receded from her; she
remained quite valiant but tolerant, restrained; doing her best to do
the extraordinary things required of her, but essentially a being of
passive dignities, living chiefly for them; Letty careering by her, keen
and swift, was like a creature of a different species....

Mr. Britling cerebrated abundantly about these contrasts.

"What has been blown in among us by these German shells," he said, "is
essentially a Catholic family. Blown clean out of its setting.... We who
are really--Neo-Europeans....

"At first you imagine there is nothing separating us but language.
Presently you find that language is the least of our separations. These
people are people living upon fundamentally different ideas from ours,
ideas far more definite and complete than ours. You imagine that home in
Antwerp as something much m