"I suppose I mean knowing what this country stands for, and being true to it oneself through thick and thin. There'll be thin and there'll be thick--plenty of them both--but it will be a question of the value of the individual. If there had been ten righteous men in Sodom and Gomorrah, they wouldn't have been destroyed. I take that as a kind of figure. A handful of disinterested, whole-hearted, clean-hearted, and perhaps I ought to add stout-hearted Americans, who know what they believe and live by it, will hold the fort against all efforts, within and without, to pull it down." He paused in his walk, obliging me to do the same. "I've been thinking a good deal," he smiled, "during the past few weeks of your law of Right--with a capital. I laughed at it when you first spoke of it--" "Oh, hardly that," I interposed. "But I've come to believe that it will work." "I'm so glad." "In fact, it's the only thing that will work." "Exactly," I exclaimed, enthusiastically. "We must stand by it, we younger men, just as the younger men of the late fifties stood by the principles represented by Lincoln. I believe in my heart that the need is going to be greater for us than it was for them, and if we don't respond to it, then may the Lord have mercy on our souls." I give this scrap of conversation because it introduced a new note into my knowledge of Americans. I had not supposed that any Americans felt like that. In the Rossiter circle I never saw anything but an immense self-satisfaction. Money and what money could do was, I am sure, the only topic of their thought. Their ideas of position and privilege were all spuriously European. Nothing was indigenous. Except for their sense of money, their aims were as foreign to the soil as their pictures, their tapestries, their furniture, and their clothes. Even stranger I found the imitation of Europe in tastes which Europe was daily giving up. But in Larry Strangways, it seemed to me, I found something native, something that really lived and cared. It caused me to look at him with a new interest. His jesting tone allowed me to take my cue in the same vein. "I'm tremendously flattered, Mr. Strangways, that you should have found anything in my ideas that could be turned to good account." He laughed shortly and rather hardly. "Oh, if it was only that!" It was another of the things I wished he hadn't said, but with the words he started on again, walking so fast for a few paces that I made no effort to keep up with him. When he waited till I rejoined him we fell again to talking of Stacy Grainger. At the first opportunity I asked the question that was chiefly on my mind. "Wasn't there something at one time between him and Mrs. Brokenshire?" He marched on with head erect. "I believe so," he admitted, reluctantly, but not till some seconds had passed. "There was a big fight, wasn't there," I persisted, "between him and Mr. Brokenshire--over Editha Billing--on the Stock Exchange--or something like that?"