"Nothing? What do you mean?"
"I mean that there's nothing about me, that I have or am, that I don't owe to my country."
"Oh, stuff! That's the way we used to talk in the United States forty years ago."
"That's the way we talk in Canada still, madam—and feel."
"Oh, well, you'll get over it as we did—when you're more of a people."
"Most of us would prefer to be less of a people, and not get over it."
She put up her lorgnette.
"Who was your father? What sort of people do you come from?"
I tried to bring out my small store of personal facts, but she paid them no attention. When I said that my father had been a judge of the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia I might have been calling him a voivode of Montenegro or the president of a zemstvo. It was too remote from herself for her mind to take in. I could see her, however, examining my features, my hands, my dress, with the shrewd, sharp eyes of a connoisseur in feminine appearance.
She broke into the midst of my recital with the words: