risy! What other nation
is so candid?'

By one of those unspoken understandings that are the rules of mobs and
dinner-parties, it was felt that the topic was ceasing to be exhaustive
and becoming exhausting. Lady Durwent glanced, interrogatively about
the table; Madame Carlotti took a hitch in her gown; Norton Pyford
emptied his glass and sat pensively staring at it as if it had hardly
done what he expected, but on the whole he felt inclined to forgive it;
Johnston Smyth made a belated attempt to be sentimental with the
Honourable Miss Durwent, whose lips, always at war with each other,
merely parted in a smile that utterly failed to bring any sympathy from
her eyes; Mrs. Le Roy Jennings took a last sip of coffee, and finding
it quite cold, put it down with a gesture of finality.

'Lady Durwent,' said Austin Selwyn--and the quality of his voice was
lighter and more musical than it had been--'I suppose that a man who
deliberately goes to a country to gather impressions lays himself open
to the danger of being influenced by external things only. If I were
to base my knowledge of England on what her people say of her, I think
I should be justified in assuming that the century-old charge of her
decadence is terribly true. Yet I claim to have something of an
artist's sensitiveness to undercurrents, and it seems to me that there
is a strong instinct of race over here--perhaps I express myself
clumsily--but I think there is an England which has far more depth to
it than your artists and writers realise. For some reason you all seem
to want to deny that; and when, as to-night, it is my privilege to meet
some of this country's expressionists, it appears that none has any
intention of trying to reveal what is fine in your life as a
people--you seek only to satirise, caricature, or damn altogether. If
I believe my ears, there is nothing but stupidity and insularity in
England. If I listen to my senses, to my subconscious mind, I feel
that a great crisis would reveal that she is still the bed-rock of
civilisation.'

Madame Carlotti raised her glass.

'To America's next ambassador to England!' she cried.

III.

The momentous evening was drawing to a close.

Rain, in fitful gusts, had been besieging the windows, driven by an
ill-tempered wind that blustered around the streets, darting up dark
alleys, startling the sparks emerging from chimney-pots, roaring across
the parks, slamming doors, and venting itself, every