“It was in India, I presume,” murmured Mr. Direck, “that Mr. Britling made the acquaintance of the coloured gentleman?”

“Coloured gentleman!” She gave a swift glance down the table as though she expected to see something purple with yellow spots.  “Oh, that is one of Mr. Lawrence Carmine’s young men!” she explained even more confidentially and with an air of discussing the silver bowl of roses before him.  “He’s a great authority on Indian literature, he belongs to a society for making things pleasant for Indian students in London, and he has them down.”

“And Mr. Lawrence Carmine?” he pursued.

Even more intimately and confidentially she indicated Mr. Carmine, as it seemed by a motion of her eyelash.

Mr. Direck prepared to be even more sotto-voce and to plumb a much profounder mystery.  His eye rested on the perambulator; he leant a little nearer to the ear....  But the strawberries interrupted him.

“Strawberries!” said the young lady, and directed his regard to his left shoulder by a little movement of her head.

He found one of the boys with a high-piled plate ready to serve him.

And then Mrs. Britling resumed her conversation with him.  She was so ignorant, she said, of things American, that she did not even know if they had strawberries there.  At any rate, here they were at the crest of the season, and in a very good year.  And in the rose season too.  It was one of the dearest vanities of English people to think their apples and their roses and their strawberries the best in the world.

“And their complexions,” said Mr. Direck, over the pyramid of fruit, quite manifestly intending a compliment.  So that was all right....  But the girl on the left of him was speaking across the table to the German tutor, and did not hear what he had said.  So that even if it wasn’t very neat it didn’t matter....

Then he remembered that she was like that old daguerreotype of a cousin of his grandmother’s that he had fallen in love with when he was a boy.  It was her smile.  Of course!  Of course!...  And he’d sort of adored that portrait....  He felt a curious disposition to tell her as much....

“What makes this visit even more interesting if possible to me,” he said to Mrs. Britling, “than it would otherwise be, is that this Essex country is the country in which my maternal grandmother was raised, and also long way back my mother’s father’s people.  My mother’s father’s people were very early New England people indeed....  Well, no.  If I said Mayflower it wouldn’t be true.  But it would approximate.  They were Essex Hinkinsons.  That’s what they were.  I must be a good third of me at least Essex.  My grandmother was an Essex Corner, I must confess I’ve had some thought—­”

“Corner?” said the young lady at his elbow sharply.

“I was telling Mrs. Britling I had some thought—­”

“But about those Essex relatives of yours?”