"Oh, one can be quite as much out of it in London. What can be more 'provincial' than the life of the average Londoner? He goes to his business after breakfast, and he goes back to his villa after tea. The few friends he makes are, naturally, in the same groove, and talk about the same things. Why," he went on, overjoyed to have found his tongue, "he has no more acquaintance with artistic London, or political London, or fashionable London than the people with businesses and villas in the other towns. I don't understand the average Londoner's idea that, because his own particular hencoop is in the capital, he must have a wider range of vision than all the other hens in the kingdom; I don't know what it's based on. One would suppose that the sight of the General Post Office from the top of a bus every day converted people into a kind of intellectual aristocracy. The suburbs snigger at the provinces, and Bloomsbury sneers at the suburbs, and the truth is that, outside a few exclusive circles, Londoners get all their knowledge of London from the newspapers—which the provincials are reading at the same time."
She was not interested in the subject; it struck her only as a strange one for him to discuss.
"I suppose so," she said. "Still in London one sees things and one can get books to read. It's as difficult to get a new book in Beckenhampton as it is to get cream in the country."
"Is that difficult?" he asked, thinking of Keats's "tight little fairy."
"Oh, you don't know the country very well. Try! They look at you amazed when you ask for it." She laughed. "Last year when we went away we took a new American tinned thing in the shape of a breakfast food with us. I forget what it was called; a sort of porridge. They told you on the tin that it was to be eaten with cream. Carelessly, 'cream'! I believe in America cream isn't a curiosity. Our efforts to get threepennyworth! There was only one place for miles round where there was the slightest chance of it—a dairy belonging to a great lady who supplied the public with milk as a favour. I don't mean that she didn't take their money, but that the customers had to call for the milk and carry it away. We used to go there two or three times a week and kow-tow to a consequential dairy woman. We almost thought at first she must be the great lady, but when she accepted our tips we concluded she wasn't. She unbent so far as to promise 'to try to manage it for us one morning.' After about a fortnight we reckoned it would have cost us two shillings by the time it was 'managed.' I daresay it would have cost more, but we decided that we couldn't afford the price of threepennyworth of cream in the country, and we never got any. I can't say I'm very fond of the country on the whole."
"Why, I imagined you loved it. That is"—he corrected himself hastily—"you've the air of being so contented out here."
"Have I? Oh, I do gush about it sometimes, but"—she shrugged her shoulders—"country walks are rather tiresome after you've got used to them, don't you think so?"
He hesitated. "I think they must have been pleasanter before bicycles were invented," he said; "it's difficult to enjoy a stroll along a country lane when you have to keep skipping into a hedge to save yourself from being cut in halves. Men who drive realise their responsibility, but every counter-jumper seems to ride a bicycle, and the cad in power is always dangerous. The most exasperating thing about the country to me is the blindness and deafness of the people to all the beauties round them. I'll except Mr. Kemp because I've discovered that he notices the birds—they steal his grain, and he shoots them—but I've been trying to learn the names of the wild-flowers ever since I've been here, and it's impossible; one might as well inquire at Bethnal Green."
"I didn't know that," she said; "I haven't tried to find out. But certainly everybody is very stupid."
There was a moment's silence. His glance wandered, and reverted to her. She made a delightful picture; she was as lovely a philistine as ever looked to the main chance with the gaze of a goddess, and for him she had the magic of letters that she had never written, the seduction of thoughts that she had never known. He would not admit to himself that a shade of disappointment was clouding his mood.