(This was before Robert Frost had come into his fame, but New England had printed a verse or two and then forgotten them.)
"I didn't know you were such a fellow," said Choate, really interested, in an impersonal way. "You go to my head."
"Sometimes I think," said Jeff, not half noticing him, "that what really was doing in me in jail was country—country—patriotism, a kind of irrational thing—sort of mother love applied to the soil—the thing men die for. Call it liberty, if you want to, but it's all boiled down now to Addington. Choate, don't you see Addington took hold on eternal things? Don't you know how deep her roots go? She was settled by English. You and I are English. We aren't going to let east of Europe or south of Europe or middle Europe come over here and turn old Addington into something that's not Anglo-Saxon. O Choate, wake up. Come alive. Stop being temperate. Run for mayor and beat Weedie out of his skin."
"Dear fellow," said Choate, looking at him as if for an instant he too were willing to speak out, "you live in a country where the majority rules. And the majority has a perfect right to the government it wants. And you will be voted down by ten aliens this year and a hundred next, and so on, because the beastly capitalist wants more and more aliens imported to do his work and the beastly politician wants them all thrown into citizenship neck and heels, so he can have more votes. You're defeated, Jeff, before you begin. You're defeated by sheer numbers."
"Then, for God's sake," said Jeff, "take your alien and make an American of him."
"You can't. Could I take you to Italy and make an Italian of you, or to Germany and make a German? You might do something with their children."
"They talk about the melting-pot," said Jeff rather helplessly.
"They do. It's a part of our rank sentimentalism. You can pour your nationalities in but they'll no more combine than Tarquin's and Lucretia's blood. No, Jeff. America's gone, the vision, as she was in the beginning. They've throttled her among them."
Jeff stood looking at him, flushed, dogged, defiant. He had a vivid beauty at the moment, and Alston woke to a startled sense of what the young Jeff used to be. But this was better. There was something beaten into this face finer far than youth.
Jeff seemed to be meeting him as if their minds were at grapples.