"Not at all; but I don't flaunt it."
"But, papa, surely you are not ashamed of it?"
"Certainly not. But it is a little tiresome. Our countrymen are so oppressively patriotic. They demand of you that you glory in your nativity. I don't. I am not proud of it. I shouldn't be proud of being an Englishman, or a Frenchman, or an Italian, or——"
"In fact, papa, you are not proud at all."
"Natalie," proceeded the philosopher, not noticing the interruption, "one may be well-disposed toward the country of one's birth; one may even recognize the duty of fighting, if need be, for its institutions. But the pretence of believing in one's country, of fulsome adoration for imperfect institutions, is to welcome intellectual slavery, to surrender to the base instinct of fetichism."
"Like religion," she said, recognizing the phrase.
"Like religion," he assented. "You will find when you are as old as I am that I am right."
"Yet people do believe in religion. There's Fräulein Rothe——"
"Natalie, no reasoning being can believe what is called Christianity, but many beings think that they believe."
"But why don't they discover that they don't think what they think they think?"