‘But I have not seen Greece since I was a child, so high; I have lived always in Italy.’
‘Well, Italy has Calabria and the Terra del Lavoro.’
‘And how much do we in Rome know about either?’
‘About as much,’ said Lockwood, ‘as Belgravia does of the Bog of Allen.’
‘You’ll return to your friends in civilised life with almost the fame of an African traveller, Major Lockwood,’ said Atlee pertly.
‘If Africa can boast such hospitality, I certainly rather envy than compassionate Doctor Livingstone,’ said he politely.
‘Somebody,’ said Kearney dryly, ‘calls hospitality the breeding of the savage.’
‘But I deny that we are savage,’ cried Atlee. ‘I contend for it that all our civilisation is higher, and that class for class we are in a more advanced culture than the English; that your chawbacon is not as intelligent a being as our bogtrotter; that your petty shopkeeper is inferior to ours; that throughout our middle classes there is not only a higher morality but a higher refinement than with you.’
‘I read in one of the most accredited journals of England the other day that Ireland had never produced a poet, could not even show a second-rate humorist,’ said Kearney.
‘Swift and Sterne were third-rate, or perhaps, English,’ said Atlee.