"Would you allow me to suggest that it may not be entirely the fault of the language, which did not fail to express the thoughts of Chaucer and Shakspeare, that you find it difficult to make yourself understood?" "Do I speak it so badly then? You are not complimentary." "It is not that you speak it badly, but that your vocabulary is limited, and that your mind far outruns its limits. I fancy you have never read or thought much in a serious vein in the simplest and the strongest of tongues." "No, I have read very little English, but I challenge your last statement. I do not find English the greatest language. It is coarse by the side of French; it is prosaic compared to Italian. Think of the fine distinctions, the delicate shades of meaning, of the Gallic tongue. Your English can only express the extremes." "And yet to-day it is more a lender than a borrower of words. You cannot take up a German or a French newspaper without finding an Anglicism in every column." "What does that prove? Merely that the Anglo-Saxon race is more restless than all others. They are the Goths of the nineteenth century, and invade every corner of Europe, Asia, and Africa, carrying with them their barbarous language. I have heard it intermingled with Arabic in the Syrian desert. It is small wonder they feel the need of travel; there is little enough to interest them at home." "And yet I, who have lived half my life in Europe, elect to pass the remainder of it in this country of my own free choice. How do you account for that?" "I cannot account for it save as an aberration of the brain. It is strange, too, for you Americans are not a patriotic people." "You think not?" "It does not strike me so." "You are mistaken, Miss Almsford; but your mistake is a natural one. These ideas, believe me, are not worthy of you, and have been derived by you from some perverted mind. Your own is too clear to have formed such opinions. They have been engrafted or inherited. How should you really have any idea but the most chimerical one, of America or Americans? You have passed your life among a race of people most unlike them, and you have been taught to ignore the country and the race to which you belong. You consider the matter of your birth as a misfortune, and you have learned to look down on your country, from below. I have had some experience of life in the various American colonies in Europe, and I think it a great misfortune to be one of those expatriated Americans. They are people without a country. They feel no responsibility toward any larger society than their own small household circle. Unless he is called by the exigencies of his profession to Europe, the American European is very apt to deteriorate greatly. He is in antagonism with the country which he has abandoned, and his foothold in foreign society is too much on tolerance to be fortunate in its effects on his character."