Those two men are for me symbols of an England that I love. I am not sure that I can explain what that England is. I am not sure that I would like to explain it even to myself, as, maybe for the same reason, I would not like to read Jane Austen with a mental measure. I am not sure that there ever was such an England. The soil, to be sure, is there, the clouds across the sun, the teasing humours of the island seasons: the halls, the parklands, the spacious rooms, they are there. But the figures that sweep across them--are these that we see, all? Are there no others, lost somewhere, calmly ready to show themselves--are these that we see, all? These healthy, high-busted women with muscles like those of minotaurs, these girls who are either stunned with health or pale with the common vapours of common dancing-halls, these stout, graceless ones here, those too slender, bloodless ones there, these things that have no voice between a shout and a whisper, these things that have yielded to democracy nothing but their dignity--are these that we see, all? These rather caddish young men who have no vision between a pimply purity and vice, who are without the grace with which to adorn ignorance or the learning with which to make vulgarity tolerable, these peasant-minded noblewomen, these matrons who appear to have gained in youth what they have lost in dignity, these toiling dancers, these elderly gentlemen with their ungallant vices--are these that we see, all? Or was there never such an England? Were the parklands and the spacious rooms never peopled but by nincompoops let loose by wealth among the graces of learning and fashion? Was there never such an England as I myself once saw in the magic of a spring morning in London? It was no more than the passing picture of Guy de Travest walking by the sulky side of Piccadilly, as he must always do to pass between his house in Belgrave Square to his club in Saint James’s Street, to which a few gentlemen will still absently resort. I saw Guy walking against the broken sunlight of the Green Park, and then I did not see Guy. It was as though from one step to another he had walked into a dimension wherein the desires of his heart melted his person into the England of his heart, and he was rendered invisible in the ambience of the Green Park and against the ancient landscape of Saint James’s. III Hilary says that I was very quiet over dinner that night. He remarked it, he says, because it was so unusual. Hilary has an illusion common to Englishmen, that if a man can utter three consecutive sentences without breaking them up with “eh,” “ah,” “hm,” “mm,” and any other noises that may occur to him as fit and proper, he must be held to be talking too much.