'Take my advice, Austin. Every time you feel that kind of dope mounting to your head, trot across the road to the club and have a swim in their tank. You'd be surprised how it would bring you down to earth.'
'You talk like a child,' said Selwyn angrily.
'Well,' retorted the other, 'that's better than talking like an old woman.'
With an impatient movement of his shoulders the younger man left the fireplace, and walking over to the piano, picked up a Hawaiian ukulele which had been left there by Mrs. Jarvis. Getting the pitch from the piano, while Selwyn continued his restless march up and down the room, he studiously occupied himself with tuning the instrument, then strummed a few chords with his fingers.
'Sorry not to fit in with your peace-brother-peace stuff,' said Watson amiably, strumming a recent rag-time melody with a certain amount of dexterity, 'but I always played you for a real white man at college.'
'Doug,' said Selwyn, stopping his walk and sitting on the arm of a big easy-chair, 'if there is a coward in this room, it's you.'
The haunting music of the ukulele was the only response.
'Here you are at Cambridge—an American,' went on Selwyn. 'Just because the set you know enlists with an accompaniment of tub-thumping'——
'That isn't the way the English do things,' said Watson without pausing in his playing.
'My dear fellow,' said Selwyn, 'don't let the pose of modesty fool you over here. They profess to hold up their hands in horror when we get hold of megaphones and roar about "The Star-Spangled Banner," but what of the phrases, "The Empire on which the sun never sets," "What we have we'll hold," "Mistress of the Seas"? Is there so much difference between the Kaiser's "Ich und Gott" and the Englishman's "God of our far-flung battle-line"? Jingoism! We're amateurs in America compared with the British—and you're caught by it all.'