“Ah, yes—to be sure. I see there is whiskey.”
Evelyn’s manner, which had been frank and equal before her friend and her brother, had frozen for Sidney into a shy stiffness not without a faint suggestion of superior addressing inferior. She had known Sidney for the ten years he had lived within two miles of Beauvais House, but—well, he wasn’t “one of us” exactly; he had a way of bowing and of pronouncing titles that discouraged equality. The conversation dragged in dreary, rural fashion through gossip of people, dogs, and horses, until she said:
“Have you heard the news of Surrey?”
“No—is His Grace coming home?”
“He’s marrying—a Miss Dowie, of New York. Do you know her?”
“I’ve heard of her. You know, I’ve not been there longer than a week at a time for fifteen years.” Sidney put on his extreme imitation-English air. “I loathe the place. They don’t know how to treat a gentleman. And the lower classes!” He lifted his eyebrows and shook his head. He was at his most energetic when, in running down his native land to his English acquaintances, he reached the American “lower classes.”
Evelyn concealed the satire which longed to express itself in her face. She despised Sidney and all the Anglicised Americans; and, behind their backs, she and her friends derided them—perhaps to repay themselves for the humiliation of accepting hospitalities and even more concrete favours from “those American bounders.” The story among Sidney’s upper-class English tolerators was that his father had kept a low public house in New York or San Francisco, or “somewhere over there”—they were as ignorant of the geography of the United States as they were of the geography of Patagonia.
“So he’s to marry Dowie’s daughter?” continued Sidney. “He was brakeman on a railway thirty years ago.”
“How you Americans do jump about!” said Evelyn, forgetting that Sidney prided himself on no longer being an American. “He must be clever.”
“A clever rascal, probably,” replied Sidney spitefully. “Over here he’d have been put into jail for what they honour him for over there.”