“I find it very different from Pomerania,” said Herr Heinrich.  “In some respects it is more agreeable, in others less so.  It is a pleasant life but it is not a serious life.

“At any time,” continued Herr Heinrich, “some one may say, ’Let us do this thing,’ or ‘Let us do that thing,’ and then everything is disarranged.

“People walk into the house without ceremony.  There is much kindness but no politeness.  Mr. Britling will go away for three or four days, and when he returns and I come forward to greet him and bow, he will walk right past me, or he will say just like this, ‘How do, Heinrich?’”

“Are you interested in Mr. Britling’s writings?” Mr. Direck asked.

“There again I am puzzled.  His work is known even in Germany.  His articles are reprinted in German and Austrian reviews.  You would expect him to have a certain authority of manner.  You would expect there to be discussion at the table upon questions of philosophy and aesthetics....  It is not so.  When I ask him questions it is often that they are not seriously answered.  Sometimes it is as if he did not like the questions I askt of him.  Yesterday I askt of him did he agree or did he not agree with Mr. Bernard Shaw.  He just said—­I wrote it down in my memoranda—­he said:  ‘Oh!  Mixt Pickles.’  What can one understand of that?—­Mixt Pickles!"...

The young man’s sedulous blue eyes looked out of his pink face through his glasses at Mr. Direck, anxious for any light he could offer upon the atmospheric vagueness of this England.

He was, he explained, a student of philology preparing for his doctorate.  He had not yet done his year of military service.  He was studying the dialects of East Anglia—­

“You go about among the people?” Mr. Direck inquired.

“No, I do not do that.  But I ask Mr. Carmine and Mrs. Britling and the boys many questions.  And sometimes I talk to the gardener.”

He explained how he would prepare his thesis and how it would be accepted, and the nature of his army service and the various stages by which he would subsequently ascend in the orderly professorial life to which he was destined.  He confessed a certain lack of interest in philology, but, he said, “it is what I have to do.”  And so he was going to do it all his life through.  For his own part he was interested in ideas of universal citizenship, in Esperanto and Ido and universal languages and such-like attacks upon the barriers between man and man.  But the authorities at home did not favour cosmopolitan ideas, and so he was relinquishing them.  “Here, it is as if there were no authorities,” he said with a touch of envy.

Mr. Direck induced him to expand that idea.