once or twice to talk to the bus drivers—­he had been told it was a thing to do if you wanted to get hold of the point of view of a particular class; but the thick London idiom defeated him, and he found they grew surly when he asked them too often to repeat their replies.  He felt a little surly himself after a while, when they asked him, as they nearly always did, if he wasn’t an American.  “Yes,” he would say in the end, “but not the United States kind,” resenting the necessity of explaining to the Briton beside him that there were other kinds.  The imperial idea goes so quickly from the heart to the head.  He felt compelled, nevertheless, to mitigate his denial to the bus drivers.

“I expect it’s the next best thing.” he would say, “but it’s only the next best.”

It was as if he felt charged to vindicate the race, the whole of Anglo-Saxondom, there in his supreme moment, his splendid position, on the top of an omnibus lumbering west out of Trafalgar Square.

One introduction of his own he had.  Mrs Milburn had got it for him from the rector, Mr Emmett, to his wife’s brother, Mr Charles Chafe, who had interests in Chiswick and a house in Warwick Gardens.  Lorne put off presenting the letter—­did not know, indeed, quite how to present it, till his stay in London was half over.  Finally he presented himself with it, as the quickest way, at the office of Mr Chafe’s works at Chiswick.  He was cordially received, both there and in Warwick Gardens, where he met Mrs Chafe and the family, when he also met Mr Alfred Hesketh.  Lorne went several times to the house in Warwick Gardens, and Hesketh—­a nephew—­was there on the very first occasion.  It was an encounter interesting on both sides.  He—­Hesketh—­was a young man with a good public school and a university behind him, where his very moderate degree, however, failed to represent the activity of his mind or the capacity of his energy.  He had a little money of his own, and no present occupation; he belonged to the surplus.  He was not content to belong to it; he cast about him a good deal for something to do.  There was always the Bar, but only the best fellows get on there, and he was not quite one of the best fellows; he knew that.  He had not money enough for politics or interest enough for the higher departments of the public service, nor had he those ready arts of expression that lead naturally into journalism.  Anything involving further examinations he rejected on that account; and the future of glassware, in view of what they were doing in Germany, did not entice him to join his uncle in Chiswick.  Still he was aware of enterprise, convinced that he had loafed long enough.