It may not be surprising that the conduct of Americans should differ from that of Englishmen, as Americans have no titles; but if they have not titles they have vast inequalities of wealth, and Englishmen can be repellent without titles. Yet, in spite of pecuniary differences between Americans, and notwithstanding the English blood in their veins, they do not avoid one another. "If they meet by accident," says De Tocqueville, "they neither seek nor avoid one another; their way of meeting is natural, frank, and open; it is evident that they hope or fear scarcely anything from each other, and that they neither try to exhibit nor to conceal the station they occupy. If their manner is often cold and serious, it is never either haughty or stiff; and when they do not speak it is because they are not in the humor for conversation, and not because they believe it their interest to be silent. In a foreign country two Americans are friends at once, simply because they are Americans. They are separated by no prejudice, and their common country draws them together. In the case of two Englishmen the same blood is not enough; there must be also identity of rank." The English habit strikes foreigners by contrast, and it strikes Englishmen in the same way when they have lived much in foreign countries. Charles Lever had lived abroad, and was evidently as much struck by this as De Tocqueville himself. Many readers will remember his brilliant story, "That Boy of Norcott's," and how the young hero, after finding himself delightfully at ease with a society of noble Hungarians, at the Schloss Hunyadi, is suddenly chilled and alarmed by the intelligence that an English lord is expected. "When they shall see," he says, "how my titled countryman will treat me,--the distance at which he will hold me, and the measured firmness with which he will repel, not my familiarities, for I should not dare them, _but simply the ease of my manner_,--the foreigners will be driven to regard me as some ignoble upstart who has no pretension whatever to be amongst them." Lever also noted that a foreigner would have had a better chance of civil treatment than an Englishman. "In my father's house I had often had occasion to remark that while Englishmen freely admitted the advances of a foreigner and accepted his acquaintance with a courteous readiness, with each other they maintained a cold and studied reserve, as though no difference of place or circumstance was to obliterate that insular code which defines class, and limits each man to the exact rank he belongs to."