"There you are! Look at that!" Darwen pointed excitedly at Carstairs. "Behold the Saxon, yellow-haired, blue-eyed, clasping his gilded idol frantically to his bosom."
"He's not yellow-haired and he's not blue-eyed, and he's clasping his own big biceps across his bosom," Mrs Darwen observed laughing.
Carstairs, leaning back with folded arms, laughed too.
Darwen shrugged his shoulders helplessly. "I'm in a strange country, I cannot comprehend. 'Don't hit a man when he's down,' you say. Why! that's the only time you've got a chance to really punish him. Oh, the fearful and wonderful Saxon brain!" He stood up, and stretching both arms above his head, gazed upwards at the ceiling. "Surely, surely, the Saxon is the devil personified. The Lord, the great Lord Nature, has endowed the Saxon with mighty biceps and a head of surpassing density. The yellow-haired son of darkness has spread himself over the globe. 'I cannot think: thou shalt not think,' has been his maxim and his passport, and, because of the magnitude of his biceps and the paucity of his ideas, he has cramped the intellect of the world. With his biceps the Lord endowed the Saxon with one idea, one commandment, 'Thou shalt not yield.' And the races of mankind, the multitudes of humanity, have spent themselves in vain endeavours to combat this idea. He has driven the Red man from America, the Black man from Australia. He stole the very country he lives in from a more intellectual, more civilized, and more refined race. Not once but many times has he been beaten, well beaten and rightfully beaten, but he could not see it." Darwen let his arms drop listlessly to his sides. "The Saxon has broken the heart of the world."
His mother went over to him and put her hand affectionately on his shoulder; she seemed rather concerned. "My boy! You were always a sportsman, always clean; many's the time I turned out in the rain on the wet grass, in the wind or the frost to watch you play, and you were always straight, always clean; I knew the game and I watched you."
He looked into his mother's eyes. "I was, mater, always straight, never cheated."
She looked proud and happy. "I know, I know!" she said. "You got that from me, from my side, your grandfather was a splendid sportsman. He rode right across country, straight as the crow flies, over hedges and ditches and walls, always straight, quite straight."
"Yes," he agreed, "that's how I played, always straight. But I never, for the life of me, could see why."
She shook her head. "Because it's not right, you wouldn't feel the same if you won by cheating."
"You're the best mater in all the world." He smiled at her affectionately. "But you have the intellectual limitation of the Saxon; history teaches me that it's useless to argue with you."