"On peut toujours revenir aux moutons" Sylvia said.
"New Zealand mutton, eh?" Hazlewood laughed. "Wasn't it a New Zealander who was to meditate upon the British Empire a thousand years hence amid the ruins of St. Paul's?"
"Well, go on," she urged.
"You're one of those listening sirens so much more fatal than the singing variety," he laughed.
"Oh, but I'm very rarely a good listener," she protested.
Hazlewood bowed.
"And don't forget that sirens have always an arrière-pensée," she went on. "However well you talk, you'll find that I shall demand something in return for my attention. Don't look alarmed; it won't involve you personally."
Sylvia was getting a good deal of pleasure out of his monologue; it was just what her nerves needed, this sense of being entertained while all the time she preserved, so far as any reality of personal intercourse was concerned, a complete detachment. She was quite definitely aware of wanting Hazlewood to exhaust himself that she might either bring her part of the conversation round to Michael or, at any rate, exact from him an excuse for lingering in Nish until Michael should come there. Now her host was off again:
"Have you ever thought," he was asking her, "about the appropriateness of our national animal—the British lion? We are rather apt to regard the lion as a bluff, hearty sort of beast with a loud roar and a consciousness of being the finest beast anywhere about. But, after all, the lion is one of the great cats. He's something much finer than the British bulldog, which, with most unnecessary self-depreciation, we have elected as our secondary pattern or prototype among the animals. There are few animals so profoundly, so densely, so hopelessly stupid as the bulldog. Its chief virtue is alleged to be its never knowing when it is beaten, but this is only an incidental ignorance merged in its ignorance of everything. Why a dog that approximates in character to a mule and in appearance to a hippopotamus should be accepted as the representative of English character I don't know. The attribution takes its place with some of the great fundamental mysteries of human conduct; it is comparable with those other riddles of why a chauffeur always waits till you get into the car again before he turns round, or why kidneys are so rare in beefsteak-and-kidney pudding, or why every man in the course of his life has either wanted to buy or has bought a rustic summer-house. The lion, however, really is typical of the Englishman: somewhat blond and very agile, physically courageous, morally timid, fierce, full of domestic virtues, tolerant of jackals, generous, cunning, graceful, arrogant, and acquisitive: he seems to me a perfect symbol of the British race."
"Is your friend at the diplomats' table so very leonine?" Sylvia asked.