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.