“I shall have to ask her nationality outright,” he thought.
“Then you do not live in America all the time?” he said.
“Not now, we are ‘birds of passage,’ and, like them, follow the spring-time; our habitation is usually settled by the climate.”
“And do you know England?” he asked.
“Quite well, I was at school in England, and some of my dearest friends are living there.”
“Some church school,” he mentally remarked.
“Ah, then, perhaps you do not altogether despise our little island, and look down upon us from your bigness with the scorn that most of your compatriots do?”
“He is trying to make sport. I shall foil him,” she thought, and quite calmly said—
“Look down upon a country upon whose possessions ‘the sun never sets’? Besides, the fact that I stay so much in England ought to prove how much I admire most of its institutions.”
“Clever girl!” he thought, “trying to be a little satirical, and doesn’t commit herself as to all of our ‘institutions.’ I must make her angry to get her real opinion.”