I said as much without much protest, but when I ventured that the English might possibly be falling behind in the world’s race, and that other nations, such as the Germans and the Americans, might rapidly be displacing them, I evoked a storm of opposition. The sedate Mr. F. rose to this argument. It began at the dinner-table and was continued in the general living-room later. He sneered at the suggestion that the Germans could possibly conquer or displace England, and hoped for the day when the issue might be tried out physically. Mr. Lewis laughed as he spoke of the long way America had to go before it could achieve any social importance even within itself. It was a thrashing whirlpool of foreign elements. He had recently been to the United States, and in one of the British journals then on the stands was a long estimate by him of America’s weaknesses and potentialities. He poked fun at the careless, insulting manners of the people, their love of show, their love of praise. No Englishman, having tasted the comforts of civilized life in England, could ever live happily in America. There was no such thing as a serving class. He objected to American business methods as he had encountered them, and I could see that he really disliked America. To a certain extent he disliked me for being an American, and possibly resented my literary actuality for obtruding itself upon England. I enjoyed these two men as exceedingly able combatants--men against whose wits I could sharpen my own. I mention them because, in a measure, they suggested the literary and artistic atmosphere of London. They went about, I was informed, to one London drawing-room and another. Mr. F. was considered an excellent judge of art; Mr. Lewis an important critic. Their mode of living constituted a touch of the better Grub Street of to-day. It was not bad. “London sings in my ears.” I remember writing this somewhere about the fourth or fifth day of my stay. It was delicious, the sense of novelty and wonder it gave me. I am one of those who have been raised on Dickens and Thackeray and Lamb, but I must confess I found little to corroborate the world of vague impressions I had formed. Novels are a mere expression of temperament, anyhow. New York and America are both so new, so lustful of change. Here, in these streets, when you walk out of a morning or an evening, you feel a pleasing stability. London is not going to change under your very eyes. You are not going to turn your back to find, on looking again, a whole sky-line effaced. The city is restful, naïve, in a way tender and sweet, like an old song. London is more fatalistic, and therefore less hopeful than New York. [Illustration: Drawn by W. J. Glackens PICCADILLY CIRCUS]