“Of course not! You have given me plenty of cause.”
“Whoa!” shouted Rodd. “You are getting on dangerous ground again. Now, look here; why should the French hate the English?”
“Because the English never did us anything but harm.”
“Nonsense!” said Rodd coolly. “Now, look here, suppose you and I had a good fight, and I got the best of it—gave you an unlucky crack on the bridge of your nose, and made both your eyes swell up so that you couldn’t see.”
“Well, it would be very brutal,” said Morny. “Gentlemen should fight with the small sword.”
“Oh, I like that!” said Rodd merrily. “And then one of them sticks it in the other’s corpus and makes him bleed, if he does nothing worse. Why, people have been killed.”
“Yes, in the cause of honour,” said Morny, slowly and thoughtfully.
“But that wouldn’t have happened if they had been fighting with their fists.”
“It’s of no use to argue a matter like this with an Englishman,” said Morny. “He cannot see such things with the eyes of a Frenchman.”
“And a jolly good job too,” said Rodd. “But we are running away from what we have been talking about. I was saying, suppose you and I were fighting and I hit you on the bridge of the nose and made your eyes swell up so that you couldn’t see; that would be no reason why you should always hate me afterwards. Wouldn’t it be much better if the one who was beaten owned it and shook hands so as to be good friends again?”