Then the American faculty of adaptability came into play.
Anglo-American wives became sometimes more English than their husbands.
They proceeded to Anglicise their relations, their relations' clothes,
even, in time, their speech. They carried or sent English conventions to
the States, their brothers ordered their clothes from West End tailors,
their sisters began to wear walking dresses, to play out-of-door games
and take active exercise. Their mothers tentatively took houses in
London or Paris, there came a period when their fathers or uncles,
serious or anxious business men, the most unsporting of human beings,
rented castles or manors with huge moors and covers attached and
entertained large parties of shooters or fishers who could be lured to
any quarter by the promise of the particular form of slaughter for which
they burned.
"Sheer American business perspicacity, that," said Salter, as he marched
up and down, thinking of a particular case of this order. "There's
something admirable in the practical way they make for what they want.
They want to amalgamate with English people, not for their own sake,
but because their women like it, and so they offer the men thousands of
acres full of things to kill.
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