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England than any one could possibly have believed, and that in reality it is less like the traditional Old England than any one would ever possibly have imagined.”
    He was carried on even further. He made a tremendous literary epigram. “I thought,” he said, “when I looked out of the train this morning that I had come to the England of Washington Irving. I find it is not even the England of Mrs. Humphry Ward.”

CHAPTER THE SECOND
MR. BRITLING CONTINUES HIS EXPOSITION
    Â§ 1
    Mr. Direck found little reason to revise his dictum in the subsequent experiences of the afternoon. Indeed the afternoon and the next day were steadily consistent in confirming what a very good dictum it had been. The scenery was the traditional scenery of England, and all the people seemed quicker, more irresponsible, more chaotic, than any one could have anticipated, and entirely inexplicable by any recognised code of English relationships. …
    â€œYou think that John Bull is dead and a strange generation is wearing his clothes,” said Mr. Britling. “I think you’ll find very soon it’s the old John Bull. Perhaps not Mrs. Humphry Ward’s John Bull, or Mrs. Henry Wood’s John Bull, but true essentially to Shakespeare, Fielding, Dickens, Meredith. …
    â€œI suppose,” he added, “there are changes. There’s a new generation grown up. …”
    He looked at his barn and the swimming-pool. “It’s a good point of yours about the barn,” he said. “What you say reminds me of that very jolly thing of Kipling’s about the old mill-wheel that began by grinding corn and ended by driving dynamos. …
    â€œOnly I admit that barn doesn’t exactly drive a dynamo. …
    â€œTo be frank, it’s just a pleasure barn. …
    â€œThe country can afford it. …”
    Â§ 2
    He left it at that for the time, but throughout the afternoon Mr. Direck had the gratification of seeing his thought floating round and round in the back-waters of Mr. Britling’s mental current. If it didn’t itself get into the stream again its reflection at any rate appeared and reappeared. He was taken about with great assiduity throughout the afternoon, and he got no more than occasional glimpses of the rest of the Dower House circle until six o’clock in the evening.
    Meanwhile the fountains of Mr. Britling’s active and encyclopædic mind played steadily.
    He was inordinately proud of England, and had abused her incessantly. He wanted to state England to Mr. Direck as the amiable summation of a grotesque assembly of faults. That was the view into which the comforts and prosperities of his middle age had brought him from a radicalism that had in its earlier stages been angry and bitter. And for Mr. Britling England was “here.” Essex was the county he knew. He took Mr. Direck out from his walled garden by a little door into a trim paddock with two white goals. “We play hockey here on Sundays,” he said, in a way that gave Mr. Direck no hint of the practically compulsory participation of every visitor to Matching’s Easy in this violent and dangerous exercise, and thence they passed by a rich deep lane into a highroad that ran along the edge of the deer park of Claverings. “We will call in on Claverings later,” said Mr. Britling. “Lady Homartyn has some people there for the weekend, and you ought to see the sort of thing it is and the sort of people they are. She wanted us to lunch there tomorrow, but I didn’t accept that because of our afternoon hockey.”
    Mr. Direck received this reason uncritically.
    The village reminded him of Abbey’s pictures. There was an inn with a sign standing out in the road, a painted sign of the Clavering Arms; it had a water-trough (such as Mr. Weller senior ducked the dissenter in) and a green painted table outside its inviting door. There were also a general shop and a number of