social greatness of my countrymen, and our
blood-earned freedom, and the natural glories of our mountains? You're
mistaken--you're mistaken."

"Social greatness? Call it what you will, your countrymen are sensible
fellows; they make a marketable article of what to you is an abstract
idea; they have, ere this, sold their social greatness and also their
blood-earned freedom to be the servants of foreign kings."

"You never were in Switzerland?"

"Yes--I have been there twice."

"You know nothing of it."

"I do."

"And you say the Swiss are mercenary, as a parrot says 'Poor Poll,' or
as the Belgians here say the English are not brave, or as the French
accuse them of being perfidious: there is no justice in your dictums."

"There is truth."

"I tell you, Mr. Hunsden, you are a more unpractical man than I am an
unpractical woman, for you don't acknowledge what really exists; you
want to annihilate individual patriotism and national greatness as
an atheist would annihilate God and his own soul, by denying their
existence."

"Where are you flying to? You are off at a tangent--I thought we were
talking about the mercenary nature of the Swiss."

"We were--and if you proved to me that the Swiss are mercenary to-morrow
(which you cannot do) I should love Switzerland still."

"You would be mad, then--mad as a March hare--to indulge in a passion
for millions of shiploads of soil, timber, snow, and ice."

"Not so mad as you who love nothing."

"There's a method in my madness; there's none in yours."

"Your method is to squeeze the sap out of creation and make manure of
the refuse, by way of turning it to what you call use."

"You cannot reason at all," said Hunsden; "there is no logic in you."

"Better to be without logic than without feeling," retorted Frances, who
was now passing backwards and forwards from her cupboard to the table,
intent, if not on hospitable thoughts, at least on hospitable deeds, for
she was laying the cloth, and putting plates, knives and forks thereon.

"Is that a hit at me, mademoiselle? Do you suppose I am without
feeling?"

"I suppose you are always interfering with your own feelings, and those
of other people, and dogmatizing about the irrationality of this, that,
and the other sentiment, and then ordering it to be suppressed because
you imagine it to be inconsistent with logic."

"I do right."

Frances had stepped out of sight into a sort of little pantry; she soon
reappeared.