It
will, also, not seem at all unlikely that an American should be of
unreasoningly extravagant and flighty mind. Stornham, having long
slumbered in remote peace through lack of railroad convenience, still
regards America as almost of the character of wild rumour. Rosy was
their one American, and she disappeared from their view so soon that
she had not time to make any lasting impression. I am asking myself how
difficult, or how simple, it will be to quite understand these people,
and to make them understand me. I greatly doubt its being simple. Layers
and layers and layers of centuries must be far from easy to burrow
through. They look simple, they do not know that they are not simple,
but really they are not. Their point of view has been the point of view
of the English peasant so many hundred years that an American point of
view, which has had no more than a trifling century and a half to form
itself in, may find its thews and sinews the less powerful of the
two. When I walk down the village street, faces appear at windows, and
figures, stolidly, at doors. What I see is that, vaguely and remotely,
American though I am, the fact that I am of 'her ladyship's blood,'
and that her ladyship--American though she is--has the claim on them of
being the mother of the son of the owner of the land--stirs in them a
feeling that I have a shadowy sort of relationship in the whole thing,
and with regard to their bad roofs and bad chimneys, to their broken
palings, and damp floors, to their comforts and discomforts, a sort of
responsibility.
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