It was a momentous experience, therefore, to hear her country discussed--not in an unfriendly way or even with prejudice, but by open-minded foreigners trying to inform one another of the facts about America as they had found them; America was a huge but quite untried quantity; its institutions and ideals seemed to them interesting, but on the whole not nearly so good as their own; certainly there was no suggestion of their endowing Americans with superior battle abilities, therefore. The nation--that nation founded more than a hundred and forty years ago which was to Ruth the basis of all being--was to them simply an experiment of which no one could yet tell the outcome. They did not say that, of course; they said nothing at all to which she could take the slightest exception. They simply brought to her the brevity and unconclusiveness of a century of independent existence in the perspective of a thousand; their national thought started not with 1776 but with the Conquest or, even earlier, when the Roman legions abandoned Britain and King Arthur reigned. When they spoke of their homes, as they did once, and Ruth found opportunity to inquire of one of them how long he had had his home in Sussex, he told her: “The present house goes back to 1582.” It rather made her gasp. No wonder that a man of a family which had occupied the “present” house since before the Pilgrims sailed, looked upon America as an unproved venture. “They’re in it to the end now, I consider,” this man commented later to his companion when they returned to the discussion of America and the war. “Quite so, probably,” the other said. “The South went to absolute exhaustion in their Civil War.” “Absolutely,” the Sussex man agreed. “North probably would have too, if necessary.” They were estimating American will and endurance, not by pretty faiths and protestations, but by what Americans, in their short history, had actually shown. “But this is foreign war, of course;” the colonel qualified the judgment dubiously. The man whose “present” house went back to 1582 nodded thoughtfully. Ruth received all this eagerly; it could not in the least shake her own confidence in her people; but it gave her better comprehension of the ideas which Gerry Hull had gained from his association with Europeans. And this morning, when she was certain to meet him, she wished--oh she wished to an incredible degree--to understand him more fully than before. She learned from a remark of Captain Forraker’s that Gerry Hull and Lady Agnes had breakfasted early and had gone out on deck. Ruth had intended to go on deck after breakfast; but now she changed her mind. She went to the saloon; and hardly was she there, when Gerry Hull and Lady Agnes came in from the cold.