laughed again, as we do when we are fairly swung by the tide,
and underneath her convulsion she quietly mused on the preference she
would give to the simple English citizen for soundness.

'What can they be discussing down there?' Miss Mattock said to Philip,
enviously as poor Londoners in November when they receive letters from
the sapphire Riviera.

'I will venture to guess at nonsense,' he answered.

'Nothing political, then.'

'That scarcely follows; but a host at his own table may be trusted to
shelve politics.'

'I should not object.'

'To controversy?'

'Temperately conducted.'

'One would go a long way to see the exhibition.'

'But why cannot men be temperate in their political arguments?'

'The questions raised are too close about the roots of us.'

'That sounds very pessimist.'

'More duels come from politics than from any other source.'

'I fear it is true. Then women might set you an example.'

'By avoiding it?'

'I think you have been out of England for some time.'

'I have been in America.'

'We are not exactly on the pattern of the Americans.' Philip hinted a
bow. He praised the Republican people.

'Yes, but in our own way we are working out our own problems over here,'
said she. 'We have infinitely more to contend with: old institutions,
monstrous prejudices, and a slower-minded people, I dare say: much
slower, I admit. We are not shining to advantage at present. Still, that
is not the fault of English women.'

'Are they so spirited?'

Spirited was hardly the word Miss Mattock would have chosen to designate
the spirit in them. She hummed a second or two, deliberating; it flashed
through her during the pause that he had been guilty of irony, and she
reddened: and remembering a foregoing strange sensation she reddened
more. She had been in her girlhood a martyr to this malady of youth; it
had tied her to the stake and enveloped her in flames for no accountable
reason, causing her to suffer cruelly and feel humiliated. She knew the
pangs of it in public, and in private as well. And she had not conquered
it yet. She was angered to find herself such a merely physical victim
of the rushing blood: which condition of her senses did not immediately
restore her natural colour.

'They mean nobly,' she said, to fill an extending gap in the
conversation under a blush; and conscious of an ultra-swollen phrase,
she snatched at it nervously to correct it: 'They are becoming alive to
the nece