“I rather think that’s worse. We at least know what we are fighting.”
“Exactly. And it has made great fighters of you. None better in the history of the world. That shows how much cleverer the American man is than the Englishman. We lie low like Br’er Rabbit, and say nuffin. American women are discontented, want the earth, but can find nothing to sharpen their axes on, and that is good for us. They may help us in the United States, and we’ll be glad to have ’em, but they’ll never rule. Now I am willing to bet my unmade millions that the Englishwomen will be ruling this country fifty years from now, perhaps twenty. I expect to live to see a woman Prime Minister. You, perhaps! Awful thought!”
“I should like it,” said Julia, frankly. “And I’m glad I wasn’t born an American.”
“Oh, you are you. I don’t class you geographically—except—well, I read up after I’d got a letter or two from you, and it set me thinking—also talking with an astrologer we have in San Francisco, who’s some nuts on Oriental lore. We came to the same conclusion, that you were a lightning streak straight out of the past—not Earth’s past, but some previous solar system —”
“Oh!” Julia sprang to her feet, startled quite out of her visor. “San Francisco! You! It is too uncanny!”
“Hoped I’d get a rise out of you. Nothing uncanny about it. Some of the weirdest characters, not to say scholars, have drifted out there. California is not the God-forsaken hole you may have been led to believe. I’ll admit that lore of any sort is not exactly our business man’s idea of recreation, and but for you I might be in happy ignorance of Oriental mysteries myself.”
“And how much do you believe?”
“Oh, sometimes I laugh at it—and myself, but—perhaps I like the queer romance of it. Lord knows it’s sufficiently un-American. Now that I’ve seen you once more—I’m not so sure how much of it I do believe. You don’t look several hundred thousand years old, not by a long sight. I hope you have a young appetite. Will you come over to the Savoy, or is that not allowed in Militant circles?”
“Nonsense. Once, perhaps; but now I’d lunch with a coal heaver if I chose.”
“Thanks! I have a taxi downstairs—”