"Never!" I declared, vehemently. "It will be always the same--till we knock the Empire to pieces. Then they'll respect us. Look at the Boer War. Didn't our men sacrifice everything to go out that long distance--and win battles--and lay down their lives--only to have the English say afterward--especially the army people--that they were more trouble than they were worth? It will be always the same. When we've given our last penny and shed our last drop of blood they'll still tell us we've been nothing but a nuisance. You may live to see it and remember that I said so. If when Shakespeare wrote that it's sharper than a serpent's tooth to have a thankless child he'd gone on to add that it's the very dickens to have a picturesque, self-satisfied old grandmother who thinks her children's children should give her everything and take kicks instead of ha'pence for their pay, he'd have been up to date. Mind you, we don't object to giving our last penny and shedding our last drop of blood; we only hate being abused and sneered at for doing it." I warmed to my subject as I dabbed fiercely at my eyes. "I'll tell you what the typical John Bull is like. He's like those men--big, flabby men they generally are--who'll be brutes to you so long as you're civil to them, but will climb down the minute you begin to hit back. Look at the way they treat you Americans! They can't do enough for you--because you snap your fingers in their faces and show them you don't care a hang about them. They come over here, and give you lectures, and marry your girls, and pocket your money, and adopt your bad form as delightful originality--and respect you. Now that earls' daughters are beginning to cast an eye on your millionaires--Mrs. Rossiter told me that--they won't leave you a rag to your back. But with us who've been faithful and loyal they're all the other way. I can hardly tell you the small pin-pricking indignities to which my sisters and I have been subjected for being Canadians. And they'll never change. It will never be otherwise, no matter what we do, no matter what we become, no matter if we give our bodies to be burned, as the Bible says. It will never be otherwise--not till we imitate you and strike them in the face. _Then_ you'll see how they'll come round."[1] He still smiled, with an aloofness in which there was a beam of sweetness. "I had no idea that you were such a little rebel."