And I should have seen it in their eyes more plainly if they had been interested. No one was. An entente between the United States and the British Empire might have been an alliance between Bolivia and Beluchistan. It wasn't merely fashionable folk who wouldn't think of it; no one would. I knew plenty of people by this time. I knew townspeople of Newport, and summer residents, and that intermediate group of retired admirals and professors who come in between the two. I knew shop people and I knew servants, all with their stake in the country, their stake in the world. Not a soul among them cared a hang. And then, threatening to put me entirely out of business, we got the American war refugees and the English visitors. I group them together because they belonged together. They belonged together for the reason that there was nothing each one of them didn't know--by hearsay from some one who knew it by hearsay. The American war refugees had all been in contact with people in England whom they characterized as well informed. The English visitors were well informed because they were English visitors. Some of them told prodigious secrets which they had indirectly from Downing Street. Others gave the reasons why General Isleworth had been superseded in his command, and the part Mrs. Lamingford, that beautiful American, had played in the scandal. From others we learned that Lady Hull, with her baleful charm, was the influence really responsible for the shortage of shells. War was shown to us by our English visitors not as a mighty, pitiless contest, but as a series of social, sexual, and political intrigues, in which women pulled the strings. I know it was talk; but talk it was. For weeks, for months, we had it with the greater number of our meals. Wherever there were English guests--women of title they often were, or eccentric public men--we had an orgy of tales in which the very entrails of English reputations were torn out. No one was spared---not even the Highest in the Land. All the American could do was to listen open-mouthed; and open-mouthed he listened. I will say for the English that they have no disloyalty but that of chatter; but the plain American could not be expected to know that. To him the chatter was gospel truth. He has none of that facility for discounting gossip on the great which the Englishman learns with his mother tongue. The American heard it greedily; he was avid for more. He retailed it at dinners and teas, and in that Reading-room which is really a club. Naturally enough! From what our English visitors told us about themselves, their statesmen, their generals, their admirals were footlers at the best, and could, moreover, be described by a vigorous compound Anglo-Saxon word in the Book of Revelations.