"How can you hope to benefit any faction of the human race which is outside your own orbit, unless you have visited and lived in it until you understood the views and aims of the individuals therein? I take up the papers and read the rot that is talked in Parliament on Imperial interests. Every politician who seeks to benefit his country ought to travel round for at least five years. Then his sentiments and advice would be worth listening to. And, mind you, this delegate business is worse than useless. Let them go on their own, and rough it like our pioneers. Then they would get to the heart of things, not a scratch on the veneered surface whilst being regaled by sumptuous banquets, and driven in luxury to see the city from a Rolls-Royce." "You sound rather like these infernal Socialists and Radicals," spluttered forth the General. "Oh, no, Uncle Tom," said Adrienne; "it is they who go round in cars, and overeat themselves at banquets." "The question of £ s. d. doesn't enter your head," said the General; "we would all like to travel and see the world, but it can't be done on nothing." "Oh," laughed Guy; "go as a stowaway—a stoker—a steward—but go, and get your mind broadened, and don't think the world begins and ends with the Trinity of the British Isles." "Rot, my dear fellow, rot!" exclaimed the General. "Britain is good enough for me. Rolling stones may roll round the globe, but they'll gather no moss; and will only fill themselves to repletion with self-glorification and—dashed cocksureness!" Adrienne's laugh rang out merrily. "You and Uncle Derrick have both been about on the other side of the globe, Uncle Tom, so don't pretend you haven't. I am the only stay at home. But if I visited every country in the world, I know I should come back and say that England was the brightest and best of them all." "Well, well," said the peace-loving Admiral, "we will admit that some of our rulers would be the better for practical knowledge outside our Empire, but travellers are not infallible. Their outlook is sometimes biased by the company in which they have found themselves." The General subsided, but he had a way of glaring at Guy that tickled Adrienne's sense of humour. After dinner she got hold of him. "You're like a turkey-cock, my dear," she said to him; "you wait till the first word comes out of this young man's mouth, and then you try to gobble him up. And it isn't a bit of good wasting your ammunition on him. He's impervious to every insult you can offer him." "Dash it all, I don't want to insult him. I think it's the other way about. But I won't swallow my country being blackened. And for consummate impudence give me an American, and that a young one." "He doesn't seem young to me. He's done so much and seen so much. But I own I'd like to see him crushed by someone. I'm sure he never has been, and I am afraid never will be."