Yet life, in spite of the current of war twisting so many things askew, does proceed in England calmly, and in something like order.  As we looked back upon our London experience it seemed to Henry and me that we were hurrying from luncheons to teas and teas to dinners and from dinners to the second act of good shows all the time.  For in London we had no Red Cross duties.  We were on our way home, and people were kind to us, and best of all we could speak the language—­after a fashion—­and understand in a general way what was going on.  We had dined at two American embassies on the continent and had worn our tail coats.  Of course Red Cross uniforms were proper evening regalia at any social function.  But someway a flannel shirt and a four-in-hand tie—­even a khaki coloured tie, did not seem to Henry and me de rigueur.  We weren’t raised that way and we couldn’t come to it.  So we wore our tails.  We noticed in France and Italy that other men wore dinner coats, and we bemoaned our stupidity in bringing our tails and leaving our dinner coats in New York.  We fancied in our blindness that on the continent no one noticed the difference.  But in England, there doubt disappeared.  Whenever we went to an English dinner, in our tails, some English ladyship through a lorgnette or a spyglass of some kind gave us the once-over with the rough blade of her social disapproval and we felt like prize boobs suddenly kidnapped from a tacky party and dropped into a grand ball.  But we couldn’t help it.  How should we have known, without our wives to pack our trunks for us in New York, that tails had atrophied in European society and that uniforms and dinner coats had taken their place.

But other things have disappeared from Great Britain since war began, and Henry was doomed to walk the island vainly looking for the famed foods of old England.  All through Italy and France, where onion soup and various pastes were served to us, Henry ate them, but in a fond hope that when we got to England he would have some of the “superior comestibles” which a true lover of Dickens had a right to expect.  The French were given to ragouts and Latin translations of Mulligan stews, and braised veal smothered in onions and carrots and a lot of staple and fancy green groceries, and these messed dishes irritated Henry.  He is the kind of an old-fashioned man who likes to take his food straight.  If he eats onions, he demands that they shall be called onions, or if they serve him carrots, he must know specifically that he is eating carrots, and he wants his potatoes, mashed, baked, boiled, or fried and no nonsense about it.  Similarly he wants his veal served by itself, and when they bring him a smoking brown casserole of browned vegetables, browned gravy and browned meat, he pokes his fork into it, sniffs, “another cat mess,” pushes it aside and asks for eatable food!  So all over the continent he was bragging about what he was going to do to “the roast beef of old England,”