rhaps he did not
know it, it was no small thing that she thought it worth while.

He stayed to dine with them in a simple, homely manner, and his
conversation at the table was sparkling and vivacious. He told them
some excellent stories, concluding with one in very broad Dutch that
they had great difficulty in following. And then Diana opened fire.

"Such a monstrous, face-distorting language," she remarked coolly. "I
wonder you don't forbid its use instead of urging it."

The gleam came quickly to her uncle's eye, though he appeared to take
no heed. It was left to Meryl to frown cautiously, and shake a wise
head.

"Don't frown at me, Meryl," said the incorrigible. "It's a hideous
tongue, and he knows it, and what's the good of pretending anything
else? I don't hold with pretence in anything."

"It is the tongue of my country," van Hert told her, more amused than
annoyed. "Every true patriot loves his mother tongue."

"O, nonsense!" with a charming insolence. "Meryl and I both have Norse
blood in us. If you go far enough back we probably are Norse. But
where would be the sense in our professing to love our country by
talking her tongue, when it served every reasonable purpose in the
world better to talk English? You're so one idea'd, you Dutch folk, at
least some of you," pointedly. "The language and the Bible and your
early-morning coffee!"

They could not help laughing at her, but van Hert indignantly
repudiated her charge.

"O well!..." she continued, airily. "You know perfectly well you do
make a fetish of the Language Question; and that your back-veldt
followers believe the Bible was written in Dutch for the Dutch race
alone; and that you start having coffee at daybreak, with relays up to
breakfast-time. And you don't expect your natives or your women to
possess such a thing as an individual will. That is a luxury for the
strong sex only!... It all means just one thing. Out in the back veldt
you are years and years and years, positive, aeons, behind the times;
and you'd sooner represent a big dam to the progress of the world than
yield one little silly, rotten cotton prejudice to help it forward. So
there!..." And having delivered herself of this piece of oration Diana
got up, pushed her chair back with a jerk, and finished, "I'm going
out on the terrace. When I think of your back-veldters, and your
back-veldt policy of suppressing all individualism and all advance, I
need the company of a few worlds and