Really the breeding that could go back to the church and what happened there was too bad for words. My impulse was to stop him by saying “Shall we dance?” but I was too uncertain of the extent, nay of the existence, of his powers of seeing fun to venture. “--that you were not English, or I should not have asked----” “Sir,” I interrupted, endeavouring to get him at all cost out of the church, “who, after all, _is_ English?” He looked surprised. “Well,” said he, “I am.” “Why, you do not know. You cannot possibly be certain. Go back a thousand years and, as I lately read in an ingenious but none the less probably right book, the whole of Europe was filled with your fathers and mothers. Starting with your two parents and four grandparents and going backward multiplying as you go, the sixteen great-grandparents are already almost unmanageable, and a century or two further back you find them irrepressibly overflowing your little island and spreading themselves across Europe as thickly and as adhesively as so much jam, until in days a trifle more remote not a person living of white skin but was your father, unless he was your mother. Take,” I continued, as he showed signs of wanting to interrupt--“take any example you choose, you will find the same inextricable confusion everywhere. And not only physically--spiritually. Take any example. Anything at random. Take our late lamented Kaiser Friedrich, who married a daughter of your royal house. It is our custom to regard and even to call our Kaiser and Kaiserin the Father and Mother of the nation. The entire nation therefore is, in a spiritual sense, half English. So, accordingly, am I. So, accordingly, to push the point a step further, you become their nephew, and therefore a quarter German--a spiritual German quarter, even as I am a spiritual English half. There is no end to the confusion. Have you observed, sir, that the moment one begins to think everything does become confused?” “Are you not dancing?” said he, fidgetting and looking about him. I think one is often angry with people because, having assumed on first acquaintance that they are on one’s own level of intelligence, their speech and actions presently prove that they are not. This is unjust; but, like most unjust things, natural. I, however, as a reasonable man do my best to fight against it, and on Raggett’s asking this question for all response to the opportunity I gave him of embarking on an interesting discussion, I checked my natural annoyance by realizing that he was what Menzies-Legh probably was, merely stupid. Stupidity, my hearers will agree, is of various kinds, and one kind is want of interest in what is interesting. Of course this particular stupid was hopelessly ill-bred besides, for what can be more so than meeting a series of, to put them at their lowest, suggestive remarks by inquiring if one is not dancing?