She appeared to consider. “Well, he stays ahead of every one else.”
Lord Lambeth sat nearly an hour with his American friends; but it is not our purpose to relate their conversation in full. He addressed a great many remarks to the younger lady and finally turned toward her altogether, while Willie Woodley wasted a certain amount of effort to regale Mrs. Westgate. Bessie herself was sparing of effusion; she thought, on her guard, of what her sister had said to her at luncheon. Little by little, however, she interested herself again in her English friend very much as she had done at Newport; only it seemed to her he might here become more interesting. He would be an unconscious part of the antiquity, the impressiveness, the picturesqueness of England; of all of which things poor Bessie Alden, like most familiars of the overciphered tabula rasa, was terribly at the mercy.
“I’ve often wished I were back at Newport,” the young man candidly stated. “Those days I spent at your sister’s were awfully jolly.”
“We enjoyed them very much; I hope your father’s better.”
“Oh dear yes. When I got to England the old humbug was out grouse-shooting. It was what you call in America a gigantic fraud. My mother had got nervous. My three weeks at Newport seemed a happy dream.”
“America certainly is very different from England,” said Bessie.
“I hope you like England better, eh?” he returned almost persuasively.
“No Englishman can ask that seriously of a person of another country.”
He turned his cheerful brown eyes on her. “You mean it’s a matter of course?”
“If I were English,” said Bessie, “it would certainly seem to me a matter of course that every one should be a good patriot.”