et a certain store upon youthful
self-reliance," said Mr. Direck.

"As we do here. It's in your blood and our blood. It's the instinct of
the English and the Irish anyhow to suspect government and take the
risks of the chancy way.... And manifestly the Russians, if you read
their novelists, have the same twist in them.... When we get this young
Prussian here, he's a marvel to us. He really believes in Law. He
_likes_ to obey. That seems a sort of joke to us. It's curious how
foreign these Germans are--to all the rest of the world. Because of
their docility. Scratch the Russian and you get the Tartar. Educate the
Russian or the American or the Englishman or the Irishman or Frenchman
or any real northern European except the German, and you get the
Anarchist, that is to say the man who dreams of order without
organisation--of something beyond organisation....

"It's one o'clock," said Mr. Britling abruptly, perceiving a shade of
fatigue upon the face of his hearer and realising that his thoughts had
taken him too far, "and Sunday. Let's go to bed."

Section 11

For a time Mr. Direck could not sleep. His mind had been too excited by
this incessant day with all its novelties and all its provocations to
comparison. The whole complicated spectacle grouped itself, with a
naturalness and a complete want of logic that all who have been young
will understand, about Cecily Corner.

She had to be in the picture, and so she came in as though she were the
central figure, as though she were the quintessential England. There she
was, the type, the blood, the likeness, of no end of Massachusetts
families, the very same stuff indeed, and yet she was different....

For a time his thoughts hovered ineffectively about certain details of
her ear and cheek, and one may doubt if his interest in these things was
entirely international....

Then he found himself under way with an exposition of certain points to
Mr. Britling. In the security of his bed he could imagine that he was
talking very slowly and carefully while Mr. Britling listened; already
he was more than half way to dreamland or he could not have supposed
anything so incredible.

"There's a curious sort of difference," he was saying. "It is difficult
to define, but on the whole I might express it by saying that such a
gathering as this if it was in America would be drawn with harder lines,
would show its bones more and have everything more emphatic. And just to
take one il