"Even dad feels that. You should hear him cuss after he's been kotowing to some British celebrity--and given him the best of all he's got--and put him up at the good clubs. They bring him letters in shoals, you know--" "I'm afraid it has to be admitted that the best-mannered among them are often rude from our transatlantic point of view; and yet the very rudeness is one of the defects of their good qualities. You can no more take the ungraciousness out of the English character than you can take the hardness out of granite; but if granite wasn't hard it wouldn't serve its purposes. We Canadians know that, don't you see? We allow for it in advance, just as you allow for the clumsiness of the elephant for the sake of his strength and sagacity. We're not angels ourselves--neither you Americans nor we Canadians; and yet we like to get the credit for such small merits as we possess." Hugh whipped off the blossom of a roadside flower as he swung his stick. "All they give us credit for is money." "Well, they certainly give you a great deal of credit for that!" I laughed. "They make a golden calf of you. They fall down and worship you, like the children of Israel in the wilderness. When we're as rich as we shall be some day they'll do the same by us." Within a week my intercourse with Hugh had come to be wholly along international lines. We were no longer merely a man and a woman; we were types; we were points of view. The world-struggle--the time-struggle, as Larry Strangways would have called it--had broken out in us. The interlocking of human destinies had become apparent. As positively as Franz Ferdinand and Sophie Chotek, we had our part in the vast drama. Even Hugh, against all his inclinations to hang back, was obliged to take his share. So lost were we in the theme that, as we tramped along, we had not a thought for the bracing wind, the ruffled seas, the dashing of surf over ledges, or the exquisite, gentle savagery of the rocky flowering uplands, with villas marking the sky-line as they do on the Côte d'Azur. I was the more willing to discuss the subject since I felt it a kind of mission from Mr. Strangways to carry out the object he had so much at heart. I was to be--so far as so humble a body as I could be it--an interpreter of the one country to the other. I reckoned that if I explained and explained and explained, and didn't let myself grow tired of explaining, some little shade of the distrust which each of the great English-speaking nations has for its fellow might be scrubbed away. I couldn't do much, but the value of all effort is in proportion to the opportunity. So I began with Hugh.