She described the home he had just built for her in Chicago, and it seemed to be a sort of Liberal Arts Building set in the last scene of a comic opera.
For a moment, I left the green to itself, while I looked at my unrefractive countrywoman with an emotion evenly divided between pity and envy. For had she not reached the ultimate happiness, the apotheosis of content only possible to the wealthy Nitro-Bromide? And what was I that I should depreciate such soul-filling satisfaction? And why should my carping analysis dub it ignorance? Why, indeed!
After a few more green miles, an important-mannered guard, who proved to be also guide, philosopher, and friend, piloted me to a dining-car which might have been a part of the rolling-stock of the Pennsylvania Railroad.
Nothing about it suggested the anticipated English discomfort, unless it might be the racks for the glasses, which, after all, relieved one of certain vague apprehensions.
But at dinner it was my good luck to sit in a quartet, the other three members of which were typical English people.
I suppose it is a sort of reflex nervous action that makes people who eat together chummy at once. The fact of doing the same thing at the same time creates an involuntary sympathy which expands with the effects of physical refreshment.
I patted myself on my mental shoulder as I looked at the three pleasant English faces, and I suddenly became aware that, though of a different color, they affected me with exactly the same sensation as the clean, green English scenery.
This, I conclude, was because English people are so essentially a part of their landscape, a statement true of no Americans save the aboriginal Indian tribes.
My table-mates were a perfect specimen of the British matron, her husband, and her daughter. I should describe them as well-bred, but that term seems to imply an effect of acquisition by means of outside influences. They were, rather, well-born, in a sense that implies congenital good-breeding.
Their name was Travers, and we slid into conversation as easily as a launching ship slides down into the water. Naturally I asked them to tell me of London, explaining that it was my first visit there, and I wished to know how to manage it.