more or less....  But these difficulties were soon smoothed away, they Anglicised quickly and cleverly.  Andre grew bold and cheerful, and lost his first distrust of his rather older English playmates.  Every day at lunch he produced a new, carefully prepared piece of English, though for some time he retained a marked preference for “Good morning, Saire,” and “Thank you very mush,” over all other locutions, and fell back upon them on all possible and many impossible occasions.  And he could do some sleight-of-hand tricks with remarkable skill and humour, and fold paper with quite astonishing results.  Meanwhile Mr. Van der Pant sought temporary employment in England, went for long rides upon his bicycle, exchanged views with Mr. Britling upon a variety of subjects, and became a wonderful player of hockey.

He played hockey with an extraordinary zest and nimbleness.  Always he played in the tail coat, and the knitted muffler was never relinquished; he treated the game entirely as an occasion for quick tricks and personal agility; he bounded about the field like a kitten, he pirouetted suddenly, he leapt into the air and came down in new directions; his fresh-coloured face was alive with delight, the coat tails and the muffler trailed and swished about breathlessly behind his agility.  He never passed to other players; he never realised his appointed place in the game; he sought simply to make himself a leaping screen about the ball as he drove it towards the goal.  But Andre he would not permit to play at all, and Madame played like a lady, like a Madonna, like a saint carrying the instrument of her martyrdom.  The game and its enthusiasms flowed round her and receded from her; she remained quite valiant but tolerant, restrained; doing her best to do the extraordinary things required of her, but essentially a being of passive dignities, living chiefly for them; Letty careering by her, keen and swift, was like a creature of a different species....

Mr. Britling cerebrated abundantly about these contrasts.

“What has been blown in among us by these German shells,” he said, “is essentially a Catholic family.  Blown clean out of its setting....  We who are really—­Neo-Europeans....

“At first you imagine there is nothing separating us but language.  Presently you find that language is the least of our separations.  These people are people living upon fundamentally different ideas from ours, ideas far more definite and complete than ours.  You imagine that home in Antwerp as something much more rounded off, much more closed in, a cell, a real social unit, a different thing altogether from this place of meeting.  Our boys play cheerfully with all comers; little Andre hasn’t learnt to play with any outside children at all.  We must seem incredibly open to these Van der Pants.  A house without sides....  Last Sunday I could not find out the names of the two girls who came on bicycles and played so well.  They came with Kitty Westropp.  And Van der Pant wanted to know how they were related to us.  Or how was it they came?...