“By-the-way,” he asked, “who is this friend of yours? The women are all crazy about him, and it’s been an even thing between my wife and Miss Groundsel which would fetch him first. But I’ll bet on my wife every time, when it comes to a thing like that. He’s a good-looking fellow--some kind of foreigner, I believe; pretty eccentric, too, I guess. Where is Altruria, anyway?” I told him, and he said: “Oh yes. Well, if we are going to restrict immigration, I suppose we sha’n’t see many more Altrurians, and we’d better make the most of this one. Heigh?” I do not know why this innocent pleasantry piqued me to say: “If I understand the Altrurians, my dear fellow, nothing could induce them to emigrate to America. As far as I can make out, they would regard it very much as we should regard settling among the Eskimos.” “Is that so?” asked my new acquaintance, with perfect good temper. “Why?” “Really, I can’t say, and I don’t know that I’ve explicit authority for my statement.” “They are worse than the English used to be,” he went on. “I didn’t know that there were any foreigners who looked at us in that light now. I thought the war settled all that.” I sighed. “There are a good many things that the war didn’t settle so definitely as we’ve been used to thinking, I’m afraid. But, for that matter, I fancy an Altrurian would regard the English as a little lower in the scale of savagery than ourselves even.” “Is that so? Well, that’s pretty good on the English, anyway,” said my companion, and he laughed with an easy satisfaction that I envied him. “My dear!” his wife called to him from where she was sitting with the Altrurian, “I wish you would go for my shawl. I begin to feel the air a little.” “I’ll go if you’ll tell me where,” he said, and he confided to me, “Never knows where her shawl is one-quarter of the time.” “Well, I think I left it in the office somewhere. You might ask at the desk; or perhaps it’s in the rack by the dining-room door--or maybe up in our room.” “I thought so,” said her husband, with another glance at me, as if it were the greatest fun in the world, and he started amiably off. I went and took a chair by the lady and the Altrurian, and she began at once: “Oh, I’m so glad you’ve come! I have been trying to enlighten Mr. Homos about some of the little social peculiarities among us that he finds so hard to understand. He was just now,” the lady continued, “wanting to know why all the natives out here were not invited to go in and join our young people in the dance, and I’ve been trying to tell him that we consider it a great favor to let them come and take up so much of the piazza and look in at the windows.”