Hemingway thereafter marked his progress with amusement not unmixed
with amazement. It came to him that there was a greater difference,
a deeper divergence between himself and Peter than between Peter and
these Britishers. The earmark of your coast-born South Carolinian is
the selfsame, absolute sureness of himself, his place, his people,
in the essential scheme of things. Wasn't he born in South Carolina?
Hasn't he relatives in Charleston? Very well, then!
In Peter's case this essential sureness had developed into a
courtesy so instinctive, a democracy so unaffectedly sincere, that
it flavored his whole personality with a pleasing distinctiveness.
The British do not expect their very young men to be too knowing
or too fatally bright; they mark the promise rather than the
performance of youth, and spaciously allow time for the process of
development. And so Peter Champneys found himself curiously at home
in democratically oligarchic England.
"I feel as if I were visiting my grandmother's house," he confided
to a certain lady next whom he was seated at one of Mrs.
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