"Well, they will have to bend to the level of mine. I shall collapse if they ask me, as Miss Lobb did this morning, 'what influence I considered the ancient religions of Egypt had on the manners and customs of the Western world?' I murmured, 'I suppose it has tended to a love of cats,' and fled."
Ferrars laughed, for the first time. "The old maid must have taken it as personal. I think, in some prior state of existence, she must have been a cat, though I doubt the Egyptians worshipping her."
"Her voice is very trying. Explain to me why your highly educated people who talk so much of 'culture' take so little trouble about training the voice? For the voice can be trained, you know."
"Certainly it can; and our singers prove that the American voice is a raw material that can be worked to advantage. But then singing pays, and speaking doesn't."
"Yet you are much given to 'orating!'" said Miss Ballinger, with a mischievous twitch of her lips. "Is not every American born to hold forth?"
"Well! As the Yankee said when he stood before Niagara for the first time, 'What hinders?' We are in the rapids of life. Why should the cataract of our impetuosity be checked? We have got to do a deal of talking to make leeway and overtake other nations."
"I think you have overtaken them. Are you a member of Congress?"
"Heaven forbid! What should I do there?"
"Serve your country, I suppose. You do not strike me as a good American, Mr. Ferrars."
"I am too good an American, and too irritable a man, to stand by and see all the jobbery and corruption that goes on, and not raise my voice. And what good would that do, even if I were elected, which I doubt? There are men shouting their lungs out all the time; there are papers, every day, denouncing the acts of a man like ——, and yet he will continue to be a member of our administration until he is hurled from power, and the opposition set up their gods in the temple. That is the result of our beautiful universal suffrage—what you are fast coming to."