“Ah,” said Menzies-Legh; and did not press me further. And Jellaby, wiping his forehead (on which lay perpetually a long, lank strand of hair which he was as perpetually brushing aside with his hand, apparently desirous of not having it there, but only apparently, for five seconds with any competent barber would have rid him of it forever)--Jellaby, I say, asking Menzies-Legh in his womanish tenor voice if the green shadows in the wood opposite did not remind him of some painter friend’s work, they began talking pictures as though they were as important every bit as the great objects of life--wealth, and war, and a foot on the neck of the nations. Well, it was impossible to help contrasting their sluggishness with a party of Germans under similar conditions. Edelgard would have been greeted with one immense roar of laughter on her appearing suddenly in her new guise. She would have been assailed with questions, pelted with mocking comments, and I might have expressed my own disapproval frankly and openly and no one would have thought it anything but natural. There, however, in that hypocritical country they one and all pretended not to have seen any change at all; and there was something so depressing about so many stiff and lantern jaws whichever way I turned my head that after my one Homeric burst I found myself unable to go on. A joke soon palls if nobody else can see it. In silence I drank my beer: and realized that my opinion of the nation is low. It was chiefly Menzies-Legh and Jellaby who sent down the mercury, I reflected, as we resumed the march. One gets impressions, one knows not how or why, nor does one know when. I had not spoken much to either, yet there the impressions were. It was not likely that I could be mistaken, for I suppose that of all people in the world a Prussian officer is the least likely to be that. He is too shrewd, too quick, of too disciplined an intelligence. It is these qualities that keep him at the top of the European tree, combined, indeed, with his power of concentrating his entire being into one noble determination to stay on it. Again descending to allegory, I can see Menzies-Legh and Jellaby and all the other slow-spoken and slow-thoughted Englishmen flapping ineffectually among the lower and more comfortable branches of the tree of nations. Yes, they are more sheltered there; they have roomier nests; less wind and sun; less distance to fly in order to fetch the waiting grub from the moss beneath; but what about the Prussian eagle sitting at the top, his beak flashing in the light, his watchful eye never off them? Some day he will swoop down on them when they are, as usual, asleep, clear out their and similar well-lined nests, and have the place to himself--becoming, as the well-known picture has it (for I too can allude to pictures), in all his glory _Enfin seul_.