And what oceans of
tea they do imbibe!
There was an old lady who sat near us in a teashop one afternoon.
As well as might be judged by one who saw her in a sitting posture
only, she was no deeper than any other old lady of average dimensions;
but in rapid succession she tilted five large cups of piping hot
tea into herself and was starting on the sixth when we withdrew,
stunned by the spectacle. She must have been fearfully long-waisted.
I had a mental vision of her interior decorations--all fumed-oak
wainscotings and buff-leather hangings. Still, I doubt whether
their four-o'clock-tea habit is any worse than our
five-o'clock cocktail habit. It all depends, I suppose, on whether
one prefers being tanned inside to being pickled. But we are
getting bravely over our cocktail habit, as attested by figures
and the visual evidences, while their tea habit is growing on
them--so the statisticians say.
As for the Englishman's sense of humor, or his lack of it, I judge
that we Americans are partly wrong in our diagnosis of that phase
of British character and partly right. Because he is slow to laugh
at a joke, we think he cannot see the point of it without a diagram
and a chart. What we do not take into consideration is that,
through centuries of self-repression, the Englishman has so drilled
himself into refraining from laughing in public--for fear, you
see, of making himself conspicuous--it has become a part of his
nature.
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