on he hoped, in his capacity of the rather
underworked and rather over-salaried secretary of the Massachusetts
Society for the Study of Contemporary Thought, to discuss certain
agreeable possibilities with Mr. Britling, who lived at Matching's Easy.

Mr. Direck was a type of man not uncommon in America. He was very much
after the fashion of that clean and pleasant-looking person one sees in
the advertisements in American magazines, that agreeable person who
smiles and says, "Good, it's the Fizgig Brand," or "Yes, it's a Wilkins,
and that's the Best," or "My shirt-front never rucks; it's a Chesson."
But now he was saying, still with the same firm smile, "Good. It's
English." He was pleased by every unlikeness to things American, by
every item he could hail as characteristic; in the train to London he
had laughed aloud with pleasure at the chequer-board of little fields
upon the hills of Cheshire, he had chuckled to find himself in a
compartment without a corridor; he had tipped the polite yet kindly
guard magnificently, after doubting for a moment whether he ought to tip
him at all, and he had gone about his hotel in London saying "Lordy!
Lordy! My _word!_" in a kind of ecstasy, verifying the delightful
absence of telephone, of steam-heat, of any dependent bathroom. At
breakfast the waiter (out of Dickens it seemed) had refused to know what
"cereals" were, and had given him his egg in a china egg-cup such as you
see in the pictures in _Punch_. The Thames, when he sallied out to see
it, had been too good to be true, the smallest thing in rivers he had
ever seen, and he had had to restrain himself from affecting a marked
accent and accosting some passer-by with the question, "Say! But is this
little wet ditch here the Historical River Thames?"

In America, it must be explained, Mr. Direck spoke a very good and
careful English indeed, but he now found the utmost difficulty in
controlling his impulse to use a high-pitched nasal drone and indulge in
dry "Americanisms" and poker metaphors upon all occasions. When people
asked him questions he wanted to say "Yep" or "Sure," words he would no
more have used in America than he could have used a bowie knife. But he
had a sense of role. He wanted to be visibly and audibly America
eye-witnessing. He wanted to be just exactly what he supposed an
Englishman would expect him to be. At any rate, his clothes had been
made by a strongly American New York tailor, and upon the strength of