"Perhaps so. Where are they?" asks he gloomily. "One hears a good deal about them, but they comprise so many places that now-a-days one is hardly sure where they exactly lie. At all events no one has made them clear to me."
"Does it rest with me to enlighten you?" asks she, with a little aggravating half glance from under her long lashes; "well—the North Pole, Kamtschatka, Smyrna, Timbuctoo, Maoriland, Margate——"
"We'll stop there, I think," says he, with a faint grimace.
"There! At Margate? No, thanks. You can, if you like, but as for me——"
"I don't suppose you would stop anywhere with me," says he. "I have occasional glimmerings that I hope mean common sense. No, I have not been so adventurous as to wander towards Margate. I have only been to town and back again."
"What town?"
"Eh? What town?" says he astonished. "London, you know."
"No, I don't know," says Miss Kavanagh, a little petulantly. "One would think there was only one town in the world, and that all you English people had the monopoly of it. There are other towns, I suppose. Even we poor Irish insignificants have a town or two. Dublin comes under that head, I suppose?"
"Undoubtedly. Of course," making great haste to abase himself. "It is mere snobbery our making so much of London. A kind of despicable cant, you know."
"Well, after all, I expect it is a big place in every way," says Miss Kavanagh, so far mollified by his submission as to be able to allow him something.