Only Lorne Murchison among them looked higher and further;
only he was alive to the inrush of the essential; he only
lifted up his heart.
CHAPTER XVI
Lorne was thus an atom in the surge of London. The members
of the deputation, as their business progressed, began
to feel less like atoms and more like a body exerting an
influence, however obscurely hid in a temperance hotel,
upon the tide of international affairs; but their secretary
had naturally no initiative that appeared, no importance
that was taken account of. In these respects, no less
than in the others, he justified Mr Cruickshank's selection.
He did his work as unobtrusively as he did it admirably
well; and for the rest he was just washed about, carried,
hither and thither, generally on the tops of omnibuses,
receptive, absorbent, mostly silent. He did try once or
twice to talk to the bus drivers--he had been told it
was a thing to do if you wanted to get hold of the point
of view of a particular class; but the thick London idiom
defeated him, and he found they grew surly when he asked
them too often to repeat their replies. He felt a little
surly himself after a while, when they asked him, as they
nearly always did, if he wasn't an American. "Yes," he
would say in the end, "but not the United States kind,"
resenting the necessity of explaining to the Briton beside
him that there were other kinds.
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