“No, you forget,” said Crane rather gruffly. “You forget it when you talk about Enoch Oates the American. I’m no politician, thank God, and I shall look on with detachment if you dynamite him for being a millionaire. As a matter of fact, he doesn’t think half so much of money as old Normantowers, who thinks it’s too sacred to talk about. But you’re not dynamiting him for being a millionaire. You’re simply laughing at him for being an American. You’re laughing at him for being national and normal, for being a good citizen, a good tribesman, for wearing a nose-ring where nose-rings are worn.” “I say ... Kuklux, you know,” remonstrated Wilding White in his hazy way. “Americans wouldn’t be flattered----” “Do you suppose you haven’t got a nose-ring?” cried Crane so sharply that the clergyman started from his trance and made a mechanical gesture as if to feel for that feature. “Do you suppose a man like you doesn’t carry his nationality as plain as the nose on his face? Do you think a man as hopelessly English as you are wouldn’t be laughed at in America? You can’t be a good Englishman without being a good joke. The better Englishman you are the more of a joke you are; but still it’s better to be better. Nose-rings are funny to people who don’t wear ’em. Nations are funny to people who don’t belong to ’em. But it’s better to wear a nose-ring than to be a cosmopolitan crank who cuts off his nose to spite his face.” This being by far the longest speech the Colonel had ever delivered since the day he returned from his tropical travels long ago, his old friends looked at him with a certain curiosity; even his old friends hardly understood how much he had been roused in defence of a guest and of his own deep delicacies about the point of hospitality. He went on with undiminished warmth: “Well, it’s like that with poor Oates. He has, as we see it, certain disproportions, certain insensibilities, certain prejudices that stand out in our eyes like deformities. They offend you; they offend me, possibly rather more than they do you. You young revolutionists think you’re very liberal and universal; but the only result is that you’re narrow and national without knowing it. We old fogeys know our tastes are narrow and national; but we know they are only tastes. And we know, at any rate I know, that Oates is far more likely to be an honest man, a good husband and a good father, because he stinks of the rankest hickory patch in the Middle West, than if he were some fashionable New Yorker pretending to be an English aristocrat or playing the æsthete in Florence.” “Don’t say a good husband,” pleaded Pierce with a faint shudder. “It reminds me of the grand slap-up advertisement of the Pig’s Whisper. How do you feel about that, my dear Colonel? The Most Wonderful Woman on Earth Waiting by the Old Fireside----”