Each of these gentlemen brought with him the implication or the intimation of a critical attitude towards England.  It was all very well for Mr. Britling himself to be critical of England; that is an Englishman’s privilege.  To hear Mr. Van der Pant questioning British efficiency or to suspect Mr. Direck of high, thin American superiorities to war, was almost worse than to hear Mrs. Harrowdean saying hostile things about Edith.  It roused an even acuter protective emotion.

In the case of Mr. Van der Pant matters were complicated by the difficulty of the language, which made anything but the crudest statements subject to incalculable misconception.

Mr. Van der Pant had not the extreme tactfulness of his so typically Catholic wife; he made it only too plain that he thought the British postal and telegraph service slow and slack, and the management of the Great Eastern branch lines wasteful and inefficient.  He said the workmen in the fields and the workmen he saw upon some cottages near the junction worked slowlier and with less interest than he had ever seen any workman display in all his life before.  He marvelled that Mr. Britling lit his house with acetylene and not electric light.  He thought fresh eggs were insanely dear, and his opinion of Matching’s Easy pig-keeping was uncomplimentary.  The roads, he said, were not a means of getting from place to place, they were a dedale; he drew derisive maps with his finger on the table-cloth of the lane system about the Dower House.  He was astonished that there was no Cafe in Matching’s Easy; he declared that the “public house” to which he went with considerable expectation was no public house at all; it was just a sly place for drinking beer....  All these were things Mr. Britling might have remarked himself; from a Belgian refugee he found them intolerable.

He set himself to explain to Mr. Van der Pant firstly that these things did not matter in the slightest degree, the national attention, the national interest ran in other directions; and secondly that they were, as a matter of fact and on the whole, merits slightly disguised.  He produced a pleasant theory that England is really not the Englishman’s field, it is his breeding place, his resting place, a place not for efficiency but good humour.  If Mr. Van der Pant were to make inquiries he would find there was scarcely a home in Matching’s Easy that had not sent some energetic representative out of England to become one of the English of the world.  England was the last place in which English energy was spent.  These hedges, these dilatory roads were full of associations.  There was a road that turned aside near Market Saffron to avoid Turk’s wood; it had been called Turk’s wood first in the fourteenth century after a man of that name.  He quoted Chesterton’s happy verses to justify these winding lanes.

 “The road turned first towards the left,
  Where Perkin’s quarry made the cleft;
  The path turned next towards the right,
  Because the mastiff used to bite....”