“Yet you have spent quite a long time in the country apparently,” I remarked. “I have really been wondering whether to stay here much longer, and perhaps you could give me some tips if I decide to stay.”
“Well,” he replied, “it’s just a matter of taste whether you like the country. I shouldn’t be able to stand it but for one thing.”
“And what is that?” I asked.
“It enables me to thank God every hour that I am not a Meccanian.”
“Yes,” I said, “there’s something in that. I myself object to some of the inconveniences that these numerous regulations about everything entail, but they are nothing, I suppose, compared with what it would feel like if one expected to spend one’s life here.”
“It’s just possible they really like it. But what sort of ‘tips’ were you thinking of? Perhaps I know the ropes a little better than you, if you have been here only a month or two.”
“Well, there are two things I would like to know,” I replied. “I am rather tired of being ‘conducted’ about everywhere. That’s the first. And I want to get to know individual people as I did in Luniland. Here, so far, I have met only officials, always on duty. It seems impossible to get into contact with real live people. Until lately, as you know, I was forbidden to talk to the people staying in the hotel; but now that I have got over that difficulty, although, no doubt, I can pick up a certain amount of information from my fellow Foreign Observers and enjoy their conversation, I am no nearer getting to know the Meccanian private citizens themselves.”
“And do you particularly want to know them?” asked Mr. Johnson.
“One naturally wants to know what the people of any country are like, and unless one has some fairly intimate intercourse of a social kind with people of different ranks and types, one might almost as well stay at home and read the matter up in books,” I replied.