misleading to say that they were
humbled; I doubt whether they even felt their relativity, whether they
ever dropped consciously, there in the Bloomsbury hotel, into their
places in the great scale of London. Observing the scale, recognizing
it, they held themselves unaffected by it; they kept, in a curious,
positive way, the integrity of what they were and what they had come
for; they maintained their point of view. So much must be conceded. The
Empire produces a family resemblance, but here and there, when oceans
intervene, a different mould of the spirit.

Wallingham certainly invited them to dinner one Sunday, in a body, an
occasion which gave one or two of them some anxiety until they found
that it was not to be adorned by the ladies of the family. Tricorne
was there, President of the Board of Trade, and Fleming, who held the
purse-strings of the United Kingdom, two Ministers whom Wallingham had
asked because they were supposed to have open minds--open, that is to
say, for purposes of assimilation. Wallingham considered, and rightly,
that he had done very well for the deputation in getting these two.
There were other "colleagues" whose attendance he would have liked to
compel; but one of them, deep in the country, was devoting his weekends
to his new French motor, and the other to the proofs of a book upon
Neglected Periods of Mahommedan History, and both were at the breaking
strain with overwork. Wallingham asked the deputation to dinner. Lord
Selkirk, who took them to Wallingham, dined them too, and invited them
to one of those garden parties for the sumptuous scale of which he was
so justly famed; the occasion we have already heard about, upon which
royalty was present in two generations. They travelled to it by special
train, a circumstance which made them grave, receptive, and even
slightly ceremonious with one another. Lord Selkirk, with royalty on his
hands, naturally could not give them much of his time, and they moved
about in a cluster, avoiding the ladies' trains and advising one another
that it was a good thing the High Commissioner was a man of large
private means; it wasn't everybody that could afford to take the job.
Yet they were not wholly detached from the occasion; they looked at it,
after they had taken it in, with an air half-amused, half-proprietary.
All this had, in a manner, come out of Canada, and Canada was theirs.
One of them--Bates it was--responding to a lady who was effusive about
the