“I think,” said the Prime Minister quietly, “that however English the Englishman may be, he will find his castle is a castle in Spain; not to say a castle in the air. Mr. Oates,” he said, addressing very courteously the big brooding American at the other end of the table, “please do not imagine that I cannot sympathize with such romances, although they are only in the air. But I think in all sincerity that you will find they are unsuited to the English climate. _Et ego in Arcadia_, you know; we have all had such dreams of all men piping in Arcady. But after all, you have already paid the piper; and if you are wise, I think you can still call the tune.” “Gives me great gratification to say it’s too late,” growled Oates. “I want them to learn to play and pay for themselves.” “But you want them to learn,” said Lord Eden gently, “and I should not be in too much of a hurry to call it too late. It seems to me that the door is still open for a reasonable compromise; I understand that the deed of gift, considered as a legal instrument, is still the subject of some legal discussion and may well be subject to revision. I happened to be talking of it yesterday with the law officers of the Crown; and I am sure that the least hint that you yourself----” “I take it you mean,” said Mr. Oates with great deliberation, “that you’ll tell your lawyers it’ll pay them to pick a hole in the deal.” “That is what we call the bluff Western humour,” said Lord Eden, smiling, “but I only mean that we do a great deal in this country by reconsideration and revision. We make mistakes and unmake them. We have a phrase for it in our history books; we call it the flexibility of an unwritten constitution.” “We have a phrase for it too,” said the American reflectively. “We call it graft.” “Really,” cried Normantowers, a little bristly man, with sudden shrillness, “I did not know you were so scrupulous in your own methods.” “Motht unthcrupulouth,” said Mr. Low virtuously. Enoch Oates rose slowly like an enormous leviathan rising to the surface of the sea; his large sallow face had never changed in expression; but he had the air of one drifting dreamily away. “Wal,” he said, “I dare say it’s true I’ve done some graft in my time, and a good many deals that weren’t what you might call modelled on the Sermon on the Mount. But if I smashed people, it was when they were all out to smash me; and if some of ’em were poor, they were the sort that were ready to shoot or knife or blow me to bits. And I tell you, in my country the whole lot of you would be liable to be lynched or tarred and feathered to-morrow, if you talked about lawyers taking away people’s land when once they’d got it. Maybe the English climate’s different, as you say; but I’m going to see it through. As for you, Mr. Rosenbaum----” “My name is Low,” said the philanthropist. “I cannot thee why anyone should object to uthing my name.”