"All they give us credit for is money."
"Well, they certainly give you a great deal of credit for that!" I laughed. "They make a golden calf of you. They fall down and worship you, like the children of Israel in the wilderness. When we're as rich as we shall be some day they'll do the same by us."
Within a week my intercourse with Hugh had come to be wholly along international lines. We were no longer merely a man and a woman; we were types; we were points of view. The world-struggle—the time-struggle, as Larry Strangways would have called it—had broken out in us. The interlocking of human destinies had become apparent. As positively as Franz Ferdinand and Sophie Chotek, we had our part in the vast drama. Even Hugh, against all his inclinations to hang back, was obliged to take his share. So lost were we in the theme that, as we tramped along, we had not a thought for the bracing wind, the ruffled seas, the dashing of surf over ledges, or the exquisite, gentle savagery of the rocky flowering uplands, with villas marking the sky-line as they do on the Côte d'Azur.
I was the more willing to discuss the subject since I felt it a kind of mission from Mr. Strangways to carry out the object he had so much at heart. I was to be—so far as so humble a body as I could be it—an interpreter of the one country to the other. I reckoned that if I explained and explained and explained, and didn't let myself grow tired of explaining, some little shade of the distrust which each of the great English-speaking nations has for its fellow might be scrubbed away. I couldn't do much, but the value of all effort is in proportion to the opportunity. So I began with Hugh.
"You see, Hugh, peoples are like people. Each of us has his weak points as well as his strong ones; but we don't necessarily hate each other on that account. You've lived in England, and you know the English rub you up the wrong way. I've lived there, too, and had exactly the same experience. But we go through just that thing with lots of individuals with whom we manage to be very good friends. You and your brother Jack, for instance, don't hit it off so very well; and yet you contrive to be Brokenshires together and uphold the honor of the family."
"I'm a Socialist and Jack's a snob—"
"That's it. Mentally you're the world apart. But, as you've objects in common to work for, you get along fairly well. Now why shouldn't the Englishman and the American do the same? Why should they always see how much they differ instead of how much they are alike? Why should they always underscore each other's faults when by seeing each other's good points they could benefit not only themselves, but the world? If there was an entente, let us say, between the British Empire and the United States—not exactly an alliance, perhaps, if people are afraid of the word—"
He stopped and wheeled round suddenly, suspicion in his small, myosotis-colored eyes.
"Look here, little Alix; isn't this the dope that fresh guy Strangways was handing out the other day?"
I flushed, but I didn't stammer.