them a taxi-man had assumed politely but firmly that the shillings on
his taximeter were dollars, an incident that helped greatly to sustain
the effect of Mr. Direck, in Mr. Direck's mind, as something standing
out with an almost representative clearness against the English
scene.... So much so that the taxi-man got the dollars....

Because all the time he had been coming over he had dreaded that it
wasn't true, that England was a legend, that London would turn out to be
just another thundering great New York, and the English exactly like New
Englanders....

Section 2

And now here he was on the branch line of the little old Great Eastern
Railway, on his way to Matching's Easy in Essex, and he was suddenly in
the heart of Washington Irving's England.

Washington Irving's England! Indeed it was. He couldn't sit still and
just peep at it, he had to stand up in the little compartment and stick
his large, firm-featured, kindly countenance out of the window as if he
greeted it. The country under the June sunshine was neat and bright as
an old-world garden, with little fields of corn surrounded by dog-rose
hedges, and woods and small rushy pastures of an infinite tidiness. He
had seen a real deer park, it had rather tumbledown iron gates between
its shield-surmounted pillars, and in the distance, beyond all question,
was Bracebridge Hall nestling among great trees. He had seen thatched
and timbered cottages, and half-a-dozen inns with creaking signs. He had
seen a fat vicar driving himself along a grassy lane in a governess cart
drawn by a fat grey pony. It wasn't like any reality he had ever known.
It was like travelling in literature.

Mr. Britling's address was the Dower House, and it was, Mr. Britling's
note had explained, on the farther edge of the park at Claverings.
Claverings! The very name for some stately home of England....

And yet this was only forty-two miles from London. Surely it brought
things within the suburban range. If Matching's Easy were in America,
commuters would live there. But in supposing that, Mr. Direck displayed
his ignorance of a fact of the greatest importance to all who would
understand England. There is a gap in the suburbs of London. The suburbs
of London stretch west and south and even west by north, but to the
north-eastward there are no suburbs; instead there is Essex. Essex is
not a suburban county; it is a characteristic and individualised county
which wins the heart. Between d