e. As our
old nurse, aged and withered, but otherwise unaltered, said to me
quietly by way of greeting: "Well, they didn't kill you, Master
Richard!" I was, therefore, alive. It was for me, the unimportant
atom, to recover my place in the parent mass. I did so. I was
English. I recovered proportion. I wore the accustomed mask; I hid
both my person and my new emotions, as was obviously expected of me.
Having reported my insignificance to the Foreign Office.... I came
down to the Manor House.

Yet, having changed, and knowing that I had changed, I was aware of a
cleft between me and my native stock. Something un-English was alive
in me and eager to assert itself. Another essence in my blood had
quickened, a secret yearning that I dared not mention to my kind, a
new hunger in my heart that clamoured to be satisfied, yet remained,
speaking generally, un-nourished. Looking for beauty among my
surroundings and among my kith and kin, I found it not; there was no
great Thrill from England or from home. The slowness, the absence of
colour, imagination, rhythm, baffled me, while the ugliness of common
things and common usages afflicted my new sensitiveness. Not that I
am peculiarly alert to beauty, nor claim superior perception--I am no
artist, either by virtue of vision or power of expression--but that a
certain stagnant obtuseness, a kind of sordid and conservative
veneration of the ugly that the English favour, distressed and even
tortured me in a way I had never realized formerly. They were so
proud to live without perception. An artist was a curiosity, not a
leader, far less a prophet. There was no imagination.

In little things, as I said, a change was manifest, however. Much that
tradition had made lovely with the perfume of many centuries I found
modernized until the ancient spirit had entirely fled, leaving a
shell that was artificial to the point of being false. The sanction
of olden time that used to haunt with beauty was deceived by a mockery
I found almost hideous. The ancient inns, for instance, adapted to
week-end motor traffic, were pretentious and uncomfortable, their
"menus" of inferior food written elaborately in French. The
courtliness had vanished, and the cost had come. Telephones
everywhere not only destroyed privacy, but brought dismay into
countless gentle intimacies, their nuisance hardly justified by their
usefulness. Life, it seemed, in a frantic hurry, had been cheapened,
not improved; there was n