she glanced he was scanning her silence with that slight quivering of his features. Poor brave little lonely man. He had spent his Christmas at Tansley Street. “Well? How was it?” he said. He was a gaoler, shutting her in. “Oh it was all right.” “Your sisters are well? Ah I _must_ tell you,” his voice boomed confidently ahead into the darkness; “while I waited I have seen two of your doctors.” “They are not doctors.” “I had an immensely good impression. I find them both most fine English types.” “Hm; they’re absolutely English.” She saw them coming out, singly, preoccupied, into their street. English. He standing under his lamp, a ramshackle foreigner whom they might have regarded with suspicion, taking them in with a flash of his prepared experienced brown eye. “Abso-lutully. This unmistakable expression of humanity and fine sympathetic intelligence. Ah, it is fine.” “I _know_. But they have very simple minds, they quote their opinions.” “I do not say that you will find in the best English types a striking originality of _mentality_” he exclaimed reproachfully. Her attention pounced unwillingly upon the promised explanation of her own impressions, tired in advance at the prospect of travelling through his carefully pronounced sentences while the world she had come out to meet lay disregarded all about her. “But you will find what is perhaps more important, the characteristic features of your English civilisation.” “I know. I can _see_ that; because I am neither English nor civilised.” “That is a nonsense. You are most English. No, but it is really most wonderful,” his voice dropped again to reverence and she listened eagerly, “how in your best aristocracy and in the best types of professional men, your lawyers and clerics and men of science, is to be read so strikingly this history of your nation. There is a something common to them all that shines out, _durchleuchtend_, showing, sometimes, understand me, with almost a naivety, the centuries of your freedom. Ah it is not for nothing that the word gentleman comes from England.” “I know, I know what you mean” said Miriam in contemplation, they _were_ naïve; showing their thoughts, in sets, readable, with shapes and edges, but it was the Tories and clerics who had the roomiest, most sympathetic expressions, liberals and nonconformists had no thoughts at all, only ideas. Lawyers had no ideas even ... “You would like my father; he hasn’t a scrap of originality, only that funny old-fashioned English quality from somewhere or other Heaven knows” ... and they could play chess together!.... “But lawyers are not gentlemen. They are perfectly awful.” “That is a prejudice. Your English law is the very basis of your English freedom.” “They are awful. The others look Christians. They _don’t_.” Fancy defending Christianity ...