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.”