“I suppose,” Robert Grimshaw said speculatively, “it’s because I’m really Greek. My name’s English, and my training’s been English, and I look it, and smell it, and talk it, and dress the part; but underneath I should think I’m really a Dago. You see, I’m much more my mother’s child than my father’s. She was a Lascarides, and that’s a clan name. Belonging to a clan makes you have what no Englishman has--a sense of responsibility. I can’t bear to see chaps of my class--of my clan and my country--going wrong. I’m not preaching; it’s my private preference. I can’t bear it because I can’t bear it. I don’t say that you ought to feel like me. That’s your business.” “My _word_!” Etta Hudson said with a bitter irony, “we English are a lost race, then!” “I never said so,” Robert Grimshaw answered. “I said you were an irresponsible one. You’ve other qualities, but not that one. But that’s why I’ve been a sort of Dutch uncle to numbers of young men of our class. Dudley’s not the only one, but he _is_ the chief of them.” “And so you took him up, and dry-nursed him, and preached to him ...” “Oh, I never preached to him,” Grimshaw said; “he had the intelligence to see ...” “To see that I’m an undesirable woman?” she asked ironically. “To see, if it’s held under his nose, that it’s profitable and interesting and healthy to do the best for the people that Chance, Providence, whatever it is, has put under him in this world. It helps them; it helps him. He’s got a desire by now to be a good landlord. It’s a languid desire, but it’s as much a part of him as his desire to dress well.” Etta Stackpole said: “By gum!” They were dodging between a huge electric tram and the kerb of a narrow street beside a grim and squalid brewery; they dipped down under a railway arch; they mounted a rise, and ran beside a green, gay with white painted posts and rails, and surrounded by little houses. Etta looked meditatively in front of her with an air as if she were chewing tobacco. “By thunder, as Clemmy van Husum says,” she brought out at last, “you dry-nursed him till he’s good enough for marrying a little person you’ve kept in a nursery, and she----” “She takes charge!” Robert Grimshaw said. “She’ll give him personal ambition, or if she doesn’t do that she’ll make him act just as if he had it, in order to please her. He’d kiss the dust off her feet.” “Thanks,” she said spitefully. “_Rub_ it in.” The cab swayed along in the gay weather. “What a father-protector you are,” she said, “according to your own account, and all because you’re a--what is it?--a Dago? Well, well! you’ve got all the virtues of Greece and all the virtues of us too. Well, well, well!”