to mention a cinema play. Surely a New England village maiden might find
herself among the wigwams in the power of the formidable and fiendish
'Little Blue Bison,' merely through her mistaken sympathy with his
financial failure as a Film Star. The notion gives me glimpses of all
sorts of dissolving views of primeval forests and flamboyant theatres;
but this impulse of irrelevant theatrical production must be curbed.
There is one example, however, of this complication of language actually
used in contrary senses, about which the same figure can be used to
illustrate a more serious fact.

Suppose that, in such an international interlude, an English girl and an
American girl are talking about the fiance of the former, who is coming
to call. The English girl will be haughty and aristocratic (on the
stage), the American girl will of course have short hair and skirts and
will be cynical; Americans being more completely free from cynicism than
any people in the world. It is the great glory of Americans that they
are not cynical; for that matter, English aristocrats are hardly ever
haughty; they understand the game much better than that. But on the
stage, anyhow, the American girl may say, referring to her friend's
fiance, with a cynical wave of the cigarette, 'I suppose he's bound to
come and see you.' And at this the blue blood of the Vere de Veres will
boil over; the English lady will be deeply wounded and insulted at the
suggestion that her lover only comes to see her because he is forced to
do so. A staggering stage quarrel will then ensue, and things will go
from bad to worse; until the arrival of an Interpreter who can talk both
English and American. He stands between the two ladies waving two pocket
dictionaries, and explains the error on which the quarrel turns. It is
very simple; like the seed of all tragedies. In English 'he is bound to
come and see you' means that he is obliged or constrained to come and
see you. In American it does not. In American it means that he is bent
on coming to see you, that he is irrevocably resolved to do so, and will
surmount any obstacle to do it. The two young ladies will then embrace
as the curtain falls.

Now when I was lecturing in America I was often told, in a radiant and
congratulatory manner, that such and such a person was bound to come and
hear me lecture. It seemed a very cruel form of conscription, and I
could not understand what authority could have made it compulsory. In