It made Fallow’s flesh crawl, this American penchant for the personal and the sentimental. The Yanks couldn’t even let the dead depart with dignity. Everyone in the hall would be in for it now. He could feel it coming, the pointless bathos, the dripping spoonfuls of soul. It was enough to drive an Englishman back into the bosom of the Church of England, wherein death and all the major junctures of life were dealt with upon the high ground of the Divine, an invariable and admirably formal eminence.
