“Whether it is n't or whether it is,” said she, “one thing is undeniable: you English are the coldest-blooded animals south of the Arctic Circle.”
“Oh—? Are we?” he doubted.
“You are that,” she affirmed, with sorrowing emphasis.
“Ah, well,” he reflected, “the temperature of our blood does n't matter. We're, at any rate, notoriously warm-hearted.”
“Are you indeed?” she exclaimed. “If you are, it's a mighty quiet kind of notoriety, let me tell you, and a mighty cold kind of warmth.”
Peter laughed.
“You're all for prudence and expediency. You're the slaves of your reason. You're dominated by the head, not by the heart. You're little better than calculating-machines. Are you ever known, now, for instance, to risk earth and heaven, and all things between them, on a sudden unthinking impulse?”
“Not often, I daresay,” he admitted.
“And you sit there as serene as a brazen statue, and own it without a quaver,” she reproached him.
“Surely,” he urged, “in my character of Englishman, it behooves me to appear smug and self-satisfied?”