They found out the best hotel in the place, and took up their quarters there for the short time they had to spend in Durban before leaving for the front. Harold went off to see if he could get a permit for his wife and her father to accompany him. Meanwhile, they wandered about the town together. This was Brenda's first experience of Africa, and she enjoyed it. It was as though she had dropped on to a new planet. The wide streets, with the verandas before the shops, the troops, the throng of Kaffirs, and the brilliant color of the whole scene amused and delighted her beyond words. The air was full of rumors of what was doing at the front. False reports and true came in frequently, so there was no lack of excitement. Even Mr. Scarse caught the fever and was not half so eager in his denunciation of the Government as he had been. Moreover, he was beginning to find out that the Boers were not the simple, harmless creatures Dr. Leyds in Europe was representing them to be. In the smoking-room of the hotel he heard stories about them which made what remaining hairs he had stand upright with horror. On mature consideration it seemed to him that if the Government handed back South Africa to the Boers, as the Little England party wished, the clock of time would be put back a hundred years, and the black races would be exterminated. In his dismay at this idea, Mr. Scarse could not help revealing something of what he was feeling to his daughter. She was delighted at his return to what she called a sane state of mind, and she openly expressed her pleasure. "I wish you could bring out a dozen men or so, father--men of your party, I mean. It might teach them that England is not so invariably in the wrong as they seem to think." "My dear," he confessed with some show of penitence, "I fear our race is too insular; we have many things to learn." "We have not to learn how to colonize or how to fight, father," she said, with true imperial spirit. "It is my belief that Providence gave us those gifts that we might civilize the world. If our Empire were to dwindle to nought it would be a bad day for the world." "Yes, my dear, it would. After all, we are the only nation that thinks twice before we do anything." In short, Mr. Scarse was rapidly turning his back upon the old narrow views to which he had so long clung, and with a broadening mind the true meaning of the Imperialistic policy was becoming apparent. Discarding the parish politics of Clapham, he took to looking around him well; and in doing so he found much to occupy his thoughts. Old and crusted ideas cannot easily be dislodged, and--to use Oliver Wendell Holmes's image--Mr. Scarse had been polarized for years.