On Sunday, Mr Clinton put on Sunday clothes, and heading the little
procession formed by Mrs Clinton and the two children, went to church,
carrying in his hand a prayer book and a hymn book. After dinner he took
a little walk with his wife along the neighbouring roads, avenues and
crescents, examining the exterior of the houses, stopping now and then
to look at a garden or a well-kept house, or trying to get a peep into
some room. Mr and Mrs Clinton criticised as they went along, comparing
the window curtains, blaming a door in want of paint, praising a
well-whitened doorstep....
The Clintons lived in the fifth house down in the Adonis Road, and the
house was distinguishable from its fellows by the yellow curtains with
which Mrs Clinton had furnished all the windows. Mrs Clinton was a woman
of taste. Before marriage, the happy pair, accompanied by Mrs Clinton's
mother, had gone house-hunting, and fixed on the Adonis Road, which was
cheap, respectable and near the station. Mrs Clinton would dearly have
liked a house on the right-hand side of the road, which had nooks and
angles and curiously-shaped windows. But Mr Clinton was firm in his
refusal, and his mother-in-law backed him up.
'I dare say they're artistic,' he said, in answer to his wife's
argument, 'but a man in my position don't want art--he wants
substantiality. If the governor'--the governor was the senior partner of
the firm--'if the governor was going to take a 'ouse I'd 'ave nothing to
say against it, but in my position art's not necessary.'
'Quite right, James,' said his mother-in-law; 'I 'old with what you say
entirely.'
Even in his early youth Mr Clinton had a fine sense of the
responsibility of life, and a truly English feeling for the fitness of
things.
So the Clintons took one of the twenty-three similar houses on the
left-hand side of the street, and there lived in peaceful happiness. But
Mr Clinton always pointed the finger of scorn at the houses opposite,
and he never rubbed the back of his hands so heartily as when he could
point out to his wife that such-and-such a number was having its roof
repaired; and when the builder went bankrupt, he cut out the notice in
the paper and sent it to his spouse anonymously....
At the beginning of August, Mr Clinton was accustomed, with his wife and
family, to desert the sultry populousness of London for the solitude and
sea air of Ramsgate. He read the _Daily Telegraph_ by the sad sea waves,
and made castles in the sand with his children. Then he changed his
pepper-and-salt trousers for white flannel, but nothing on earth would
induce him to forsake his top hat. He entirely agreed with the heroes of
England's proudest epoch--of course I mean the middle Victorian--that
the top hat was the sign-manual, the mark, the distinction of the true
Englishman, the completest expression of England's greatness. Mr Clinton
despised all foreigners, and although he would never have ventured to
think of himself in the same breath with an English lord, he felt
himself the superior of any foreign nobleman.
'I dare say they're all right in their way, but with these foreigners
you don't feel they're gentlemen. I don't know what it is, but there's
something, you understand, don't you? And I do like a man to be a
gentleman. I thank God I'm an Englishman!'