"I prefer a parlor with you in it," he replied.
Grace laughed.
"You are trying to silence me, I see. But do tell me why you will change our c's into s's, in such words as 'offence' and 'defence'?"
"I suppose we think that in 'offence' and 'defence' you English are always at sea!" returned her incorrigible neighbor.
And so the chaff went on.
One man present sustained theories which, as coming from an American, were curious. He declared there was over-education in his country, and used all the arguments in support of this view which would have been employed by an old English Tory.
Mordaunt Ballinger stared when he heard a citizen of the United States declare that muscle and sinew were not yet driven out of the field by machinery, that scientific absorption was an evil, and that the world's work cannot be done by the brain alone. It was a little too much, even for the young conservative member, when this clever supporter of paradoxes maintained that people would be happier if they knew less, and that genius was more sure to rise from a poor educational plane than from a highly cultivated one.
"Certainly," assented another, "our most successful men in the country have not been the best educated."
"Theirs was a rich soil," continued the first speaker, "that needed no top-dressing. It was just suited to the grain it had to grow. Its strength was concentrated on that. Manured with learning, all manner of rank, useless stuff would have sprung up and flourished there."
"For shame!" said Mrs. Courtly's silvery voice. "I wonder you dare to talk such blasphemy almost within the shadow of Harvard! To think that I should live to hear a Bostonian throw such an aspersion on 'belles-lettres.'"