ton they understand each other with very few words said. So they do
in Charleston. But these spots of condensed and hoarded understanding
lie far apart, are never confluent, and also differ in their details;
while the whole of England is confluent, and the details have been
slowly worked out through centuries of getting on together, and are
accepted and observed exactly like the rules of a game.

In America, if the American didn't know, he would have answered, "I
don't know. I think you'll have to ask the conductor," or at any rate,
his reply would have been longer than the Englishman's. But I am not
going to accept the idea that the Englishman didn't know and said so in
his brief usual way. It's equally possible that he did know. Then, you
naturally ask, why in the name of common civility did he give such an
answer to the American?

I believe that I can tell you. He didn't know that my friend was an
American, he thought he was an Englishman who had broken the rules of
the game. We do have some rules here in America, only we have not nearly
so many, they're much more stretchable, and it's not all of us who have
learned them. But nevertheless a good many have.

Suppose you were traveling in a train here, and the man next you, whose
face you had never seen before, and with whom you had not yet exchanged
a syllable, said: "What's your pet name for your wife?"

Wouldn't your immediate inclination be to say, "What damned business is
that of yours?" or words to that general effect?

But again, you most naturally object, there was nothing personal in my
friend's question about the buildings. No; but that is not it. At
the bottom, both questions are an invasion of the same deep-seated
thing--the right to privacy. In America, what with the newspaper
reporters and this and that and the other, the territory of a man's
privacy has been lessened and lessened until very little of it remains;
but most of us still do draw the line somewhere; we may not all draw it
at the same place, but we do draw a line. The difference, then, between
ourselves and the English in this respect is simply, that with them the
territory of a man's privacy covers more ground, and different ground as
well. An Englishman doesn't expect strangers to ask him questions of
a guide-book sort. For all such questions his English system provides
perfectly definite persons to answer. If you want to know where the
ticket office is, or where to take your baggage, or