Page:Letters from England.djvu/64

 wanted to be as they were, but I did not know what to do with my eyes; when I do not speak I look about me, and when I do not look about me I think of queer comic things, and so what happened was that I burst out laughing. Nobody looked at me; it was overwhelming. I realized that they were performing a sort of ritual, which involved the smoking of pipes, the perusal of Who’s Who, and silence. This silence is not the silence of a man in solitude, nor the silence of a Pythagorean philosopher, nor silence in the presence of God, nor the silence of death, nor a mute brooding, it is a special