He put up his large, white hand. "Another time. Let us keep to the subject before us." I omitted the mention of my father to insist on a theory as to which I had often heard him express himself: "If it's part of the subject before us that I'm a Canadian and that Canadians are ground between the upper and lower millstones of both English and American contempt--" "Isn't that another digression?" "Not really," I hurried on, determined to speak, "because if I'm a sufferer by it, you are, too, in your degree. It's part of the Anglo-Saxon tradition for those who stay behind to despise those who go out as pioneers. The race has always done it. It isn't only the British who've despised their colonists. The people of the Eastern States despised those who went out and peopled the Middle West; those in the Middle West despised those who went farther West." I was still quoting my father. "It's something that defies reason and eludes argument. It's a base strain in the blood. It's like that hierarchy among servants by which the lady's maid disdains the cook, and the cook disdains the kitchen-maid, and the proudest are those who've nothing to be proud of. For you to look down on me because I'm a Canadian, when the commonest of Englishmen, with precisely the same justification, looks down on you--" "Dear young lady," he broke in, soothingly, "you're talking wildly. You're speaking of things you know nothing about. Let us get back to what we began with. My son has offered to marry you--" "He didn't offer to marry me. He asked me--he begged me--to marry him." "The way of putting it is of no importance." "Ah, but it is." "I mean that, however he expressed it--however you express it--the result must be the same." I nerved myself to look at him steadily. "I mean to accept him. When he asked me yesterday I said I wouldn't give him either a Yes or a No till I knew what you and his family thought of it. But now that I do know--" "You're determined to try the impossible." "It won't be the impossible till he tells me so." He seemed for a second or two to study me. "Suppose I accepted you as what you say you are--as a young woman of good antecedents and honorable character. Would you still persist in the effort to force yourself on a family that didn't want you?" I confess that in the language Mr. Strangways and I had used in the morning, he had me here "on the hip." To force myself on a family that didn't want me would normally have been the last of my desires. But I was fighting now for something that went beyond my desires--something larger--something national, as I conceived of nationality--something human--though I couldn't have said exactly what it was. I answered only after long deliberation. "I couldn't stop to consider a family. My object would be to marry the man who loved me--and whom I loved." "So that you'd face the humiliation--" "It wouldn't be humiliation, because it would have nothing to do with me. It would pass into another sphere."