back to the later seventeenth century.  In the aisle of the church were three huge hatchments, and there was a side chapel devoted to the Mainstay family and the Barons Homartyn, with a series of monuments that began with painted Tudor effigies and came down to a vast stained glass window of the vilest commercial Victorian.  There were also mediaeval brasses of parish priests, and a marble crusader and his lady of some extinguished family which had ruled Matching’s Easy before the Mainstays came.  And as the two gentlemen emerged from the church they ran against the perfect vicar, Mr. Dimple, ample and genial, with an embracing laugh and an enveloping voice.  “Come to see the old country,” he said to Mr. Direck.  “So Good of you Americans to do that!  So Good of you....”

There was some amiable sparring between the worthy man and Mr. Britling about bringing Mr. Direck to church on Sunday morning.  “He’s terribly Lax,” said Mr. Dimple to Mr. Direck, smiling radiantly.  “Terribly Lax.  But then nowadays Everybody is so Lax.  And he’s very Good to my Coal Club; I don’t know what we should do without him.  So I just admonish him.  And if he doesn’t go to church, well, anyhow he doesn’t go anywhere else.  He may be a poor churchman, but anyhow he’s not a dissenter....”

“In England, you see,” Mr. Britling remarked, after they had parted from the reverend gentleman, “we have domesticated everything.  We have even domesticated God.”

For awhile Mr. Britling showed Mr. Direck English lanes, and then came back along narrow white paths across small fields of rising wheat, to the village and a little gate that led into the park.

“Well,” said Mr. Direck, “what you say about domestication does seem to me to be very true indeed.  Why! even those clouds up there look as though they had a shepherd and were grazing.”

“Ready for shearing almost,” said Mr. Britling.

“Indeed,” said Mr. Direck, raising his voice a little, “I’ve seen scarcely anything in England that wasn’t domesticated, unless it was some of your back streets in London.”

Mr. Britling seemed to reflect for a moment.  “They’re an excrescence,” he said....

Section 3

The park had a trim wildness like nature in an old Italian picture; dappled fallow deer grouped close at hand and looked at the two men fearlessly; the path dropped through oak trees and some stunted bracken to a little loitering stream, that paused ever and again to play at ponds and waterfalls and bear a fleet of water-lily leaves; and then their way curved round in an indolent sweep towards the cedars and shrubberies of the great house.  The house looked low and extensive to an American eye, and its red-brick chimneys rose like infantry in open order along its extended line.  There was a glimpse of flower-bright garden and terraces to the right as they came round the corner to the front of the house through a path cut in the laurel bushes.