He was a little disappointed to find that the servants didn’t wear livery.  In American magazine pictures and in American cinematograph films of English stories and in the houses of very rich Americans living in England, they do so.  And the Mansion House is misleading; he had met a compatriot who had recently dined at the Mansion House, and who had described “flunkeys” in hair-powder and cloth of gold—­like Thackeray’s Jeames Yellowplush.  But here the only servants were two slim, discreet and attentive young gentlemen in black coats with a gentle piety in their manner instead of pride.  And he was a little disappointed too by a certain lack of splendour in the company.  The ladies affected him as being ill-dressed; there was none of the hard snap, the “There! and what do you say to it?” about them of the well-dressed American woman, and the men too were not so much tailored as unobtrusively and yet grammatically clothed.

Section 4

He was still only in the fragmentary stage of conversation when everything was thrown into commotion by the important arrival of Lady Frensham, and there was a general reshuffling of places.  Lady Frensham had arrived from London by automobile; she appeared in veils and swathings and a tremendous dust cloak, with a sort of nephew in her train who had driven the car.  She was manifestly a constitutionally triumphant woman.  A certain afternoon lassitude vanished in the swirl of her arrival.  Mr. Philbert removed wrappings and handed them to the manservant.

“I lunched with Sir Edward Carson to-day, my dear,” she told Lady Homartyn, and rolled a belligerent eye at Philbert.

“And is he as obdurate as ever?” asked Sir Thomas.

“Obdurate!  It’s Redmond who’s obdurate,” cried Lady Frensham.  “What do you say, Mr. Britling?”

“A plague on both your parties,” said Mr. Britling.

“You can’t keep out of things like that,” said Lady Frensham with the utmost gusto, “when the country’s on the very verge of civil war....  You people who try to pretend there isn’t a grave crisis when there is one, will be more accountable than any one—­when the civil war does come.  It won’t spare you.  Mark my words!”

The party became a circle.

Mr. Direck found himself the interested auditor of a real English country-house week-end political conversation.  This at any rate was like the England of which Mrs. Humphry Ward’s novels had informed him, but yet not exactly like it.  Perhaps that was due to the fact that for the most part these novels dealt with the England of the ’nineties, and things had lost a little in dignity since those days.  But at any rate here were political figures and titled people, and they were talking about the “country."...

Was it possible that people of this sort did “run” the country, after all?...  When he had read Mrs. Humphry Ward in America he had always accepted this theory of the story quite easily, but now that he saw and heard them—!