"We're very simple folk, mere country cousins compared with you," he had also observed, "and Paris, for my sister and her husband, is the end of the world.

London therefore will be more or less another planet.

It has always been, as with so many of us, quite their Mecca, but this is their first real caravan; they've mainly known 'old England' as a shop for articles in india-rubber and leather, in which they've dressed themselves as much as possible.

Which all means, however, that you'll see them, all of them, wreathed in smiles.

We must be very easy with them.