Clarissa hails a cab which is, in fact, very much pulled by a horse. 

"Brother has six letters and rhymes with, I don't know, higher?"

"Oooh, the word I'm saying has seven letters. Or maybe you just have the thorn as a letter still. Are the letter sounds "buh", ruh", a generic vowel, "thhh", a different letter acting as a generic vowel, and "ruh" again? --or I can shut up, that's also an option."

"Fuh, ih, lee, ih, uh, mmmm."

"Ohhhhhh wow that's a totally different word. Invisible translation effect." Possibly he should not have written off the "there are gods involved" hypothesis so quickly, because that level of seamlessness has to be using a lot of very sophisticated compute on an ongoing basis.

"I wonder how many languages sound like your language to you. Could be useful."

"Oooh, yes! Do you know any other ones? Come to think of it, I can't be sure you didn't just use one. Heh."

"That was in Latin. This is in Greek. This is in Gallian. This is in Hindi. That are China."

"English English English! Awesome! That last one came through with kind of screwy grammar, I got "that are China", but I understood all of them! Also your level of non-cheating polyglottalism is impressive."

"Thank you! I've been trying to learn the languages of everywhere important and all the places we rule. --Sounds like I need to work on my Chinese grammar though."

"Well, we don't know that the error wasn't on my end; I'd want to experiment more. What do you do when you're not helping stranded people?"

"I'm a member of the Assembly."

"Oh, cool. That's your legislative body, right?"

"Half of it. The Senate is composed of the peerage, the Assembly is chosen by a vote of all the dominant landowners aged at least thirty in the district. --Naturally, the districts haven't changed in five hundred years."

"We have a similar setup, except our voting age is eighteen and that's the only qualification, and the Senate is elected by state instead of having a peerage. The House of Representatives changes its districts every ten years but I don't know that I'd recommend it, the resulting maps are kind of a mess."

"My district eroded into the ocean. No one lives there because it is entirely underwater."

"Oh no, that is a shenanigan. How, uh, how does it do elections?"

"The lord who owns it selected me."

"Well, I guess if you're going to have lords of places that's a decent consolation prize for being a lord of a patch of ocean. Does not having constituents make it easier to do things for the good of the whole country?"

"Well, I still have to please the lord, but it's easier to please one person than many, I find."

"Yeah, I'll bet. And presumably they already agree with you on at least some things or they wouldn't've picked you. What sort of policy issues are people disagreeing on nowadays?"

"The war with Gallia, tariff policy, patents, monopolies, the poor laws, enclosure..."

"There's a war on? I'm sorry to hear it."

"The mad emperor Cyrus is attempting to take over Europa."

Well, that's one side's one-sentence summary, but "That sounds unpleasant. Sorry to say my world still has wars sometimes too."

"Eli'll be excited about that. He keeps trying to explain to me that if we have free trade then there won't be any wars anymore because you'd be getting all your material for cannons and ships from the people you're trying to kill."