The “ourselves” went very far. This at least was the modest, unexpressed opinion of Miss Adgate,—it was shared, apparently, by the Man at the Helm. He lectured the Nation like a father. The Nation knowing itself to be unwholesome, inchoate, something ruthless, listened meekly.
“But,” Ruth reflected from the vantage of a calm and sympathetic observation: “So many religions, no Faith! Where every man, in disobedience to Christ, chooses to be his own Pope. Yet the Holy Father has dedicated America to Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception.... But the very elements in America, so violent and so ferocious,—the burning Summers, the cruel Winters, the appalling cataclysms of Nature, if these are reproduced in the violent characters of the people, inclined to rape and rapine on a big or a little scale—at what end, left to its own devices, will the American character issue? Will it,” she wondered, “become, inflated with power, the great Master Robber of the World? Or will it perish utterly, hoist by its own petard?”
“Jerusalem! Jerusalem! Convertere ad Dominum Deum.”... Mournful and tender, in the melodious, yearning, touching accents of Tenebrae, the phrase filled her ears.
“No man at the Helm,” she sorrowfully said to herself, “shall save us for more than his few years of tenure. The race cries for direction, a sane outlet to its emotions. The sole influence which holds anarchy at bay is Holy Mother Church, wise men tell us. Yes, the Divine Authority!.. The sweet miracle of the Catholic Faith may save our people from ending as a nation of brutes; may open to us the gates of Humility and show to us the road to the 'Greater Glory of God.'”
And then, Miss Adgate woke with a start from her musings. She shook her pretty head. She returned to the practice of light banter and witty causerie, the only efficacious methods within reach, she reflected, of furthering the millennium her fancy painted for her native land.
II
“My little dear Ruth,” Lucilla wrote, “we're coming on the most important mission to America. Namely, to see you. Yes, and haven't I a bagful of news for your Royal Highness!
“We sail by the Cedric on the fifteenth of April, Harry can't leave until then. To confess the truth, he is in Altronde. Civillo,—of course you've seen it by the papers,—Civillo is gone to a greater Principality, Bertram is King.
“I want to see you—oh! And Ruth, I burn with curiosity to look on that New England of yours. Harry, I'm convinced, is prepared to settle there. He says, so pathetically, that at his time of life he feels the need of planting cabbages and that the Upper Gardener at Pontycroft gives notice when he tries to. He's heard that in New England gardeners are kind, don't mind a bit; they just let you plant, right down; are affable; make you settle right down and become one of 'em. But Harry says, too, he pines at first hand to solve the inwardness of a land destined to dominate us all.
“Ruth, between you and me, in confidence, if America is to be the future of Europe—well—then I'm glad I shall be dead.