hour, that he was not. During the first half hour it is, of course, impossible to notice anything. We had sunk to the level of generalities when I happened to mention Oddie.

"He had darker hair than you have, dear," I said, "and his eyes were blue. Not sky blue, or china blue, but a kind of sea blue on a cloudy day. He had rather good eyes," I added reminiscently.

"Had he?" said Arthur.

"But your noses," I went on reassuringly, "were not to be compared with each other."

"Oh!" said Arthur.

"He was so impulsive!" I couldn't help smiling a little at the recollection. "But for that matter they all were."

"Impulsive?" asked Arthur.

"Yes. Ridiculously so. They thought as little of proposing as of asking one to dance."

"Ah!" said Arthur.

"Of course, I never accepted any of them, even for a moment. But they had such a way of taking things for granted. Why one man actually thought I was engaged to him!"

"Really!" said Arthur. "May I inquire——"

"No, dear," I replied, "I think not. I couldn't tell anybody about it—for his sake. It was all a silly mistake. Some of them," I added thoughtfully, "were very stupid."

"Judging from the specimens that find their way over here," Arthur remarked, "I should say there was plenty of room in their heads for their brains."

Arthur was sitting on the other side of the fireplace, and by this time his expression was aggressive. I thought his remark unnecessarily caustic, but I did not challenge it.

"Some of them were stupid," I repeated, "but they were nearly all nice." And I went on to say that what Chicago people as a whole thought about it I didn't know and I didn't care, but so far as my experience went the English were the loveliest nation in the world.

"A nation like a box of strawberries," Mr. Page suggested, "all the big ones on top, all the little ones at the bottom."

"That doesn't matter to us," I replied cheerfully, "we never get any further than the top. And you'll admit there's a great tendency for little ones to shake down. It's only a question of time. They've had so much time in England. You see the effects of it everywhere."

"Not at all. By no means. Our little strawberries rise," he declared.

"Do they? Dear me, so they do! I suppose the American law of gravity is different. In England they would certainly smile at that."

Arthur said nothing, but his whole bearing expressed a contempt for puns.

"Of course," I said, "I mean the loveliest nation after Americans."

I thought he might have taken that for granted. Instead, he looked incredulous and smiled, in an observing, superior way.

"Why do you say 'ahfter'?" he asked. His tone was sweetly acidulated.

"Why do you say 'affter'?" I replied simply.

"Because," he answered with quite unnecessary emphasis, "in the part of the world I come from everybody says it. Because my mother has brought me up to say it."

"Oh," I said, looking at the lamp, "they say it like that in other parts of the world too. In Yorkshire—and such places. As far as mothers go, I must tell you that momma approves of my pronunciation. She likes it better than anything else I have brought back with me—even my tailor-mades—and thinks it wonderful that I should have acquired it in the time."

"Don't you think you could remember a little of your good old American? Doesn't it seem to come back to you?"

All the Wicks hate sarcasm, especially from those they love, and I certainly had not outgrown my fondness for Mr. Page at this time.

"It all came back to me, my dear Arthur," I said, "the moment you opened your lips!"

At that not only Mr. Page's features and his shirt front, but his whole personality seemed to stiffen. He sat up and made an outward movement on the seat of his chair which signified, "My hat and overcoat are in the hall, and if you do not at once retract——"

"Rather than allow anything to issue from them which would imply that I was not an American I would keep them closed for ever," he said.

"You needn't worry about that," I observed. "Nothing ever will. But I don't know why we should glory in talking through our noses." Involuntarily I played with my engagement ring, slipping it up and down, as I spoke.

Arthur rose with an expression of tolerant amusement—entirely forced—and stood by the fireplace. He stood beside it, with his elbow on the mantelpiece, not in front of it with his legs apart, and I thought with a pang how much more graceful the American attitude was.

"Have you come back to tell us that we talk through our noses?" he asked.

"I don't like being called an Anglomaniac," I replied, dropping my ring from one finger to another. Fortunately I was sitting in a rocking chair—the only one I had not been able to persuade momma to have taken out of the drawing-room. The rock was a considerable relief to my nerves.

"I knew that the cockneys on the other side were fond of inventing fictions about what they are pleased to call the 'American accent,'" continued Mr. Page, with a scorn which I felt in the very heels of my shoes, "but I confess I thought you too patriotic to be taken in by them."

"Taken in by them" was hard to bear, but I thought if I said nothing at this point we might still have a peaceful evening. So I kept silence.

"Of course, I speak as a mere product of the American Constitution—a common unit of the democracy," he went on, his sentences gathering wrath as he rolled them out, "but if there were such a thing as an American accent, I think I've lived long enough, and patrolled this little Union of ours extensively enough, to hear it by this time. But it appears to be necessary to reside four months in England, mixing freely with earls and countesses, to detect it."

"Perhaps it is," I said, and I may have smiled.

"I should hate to pay the price."

Mr. Page's tone distinctly expressed that the society of earls and countesses would be, to him, contaminating.

Again I made no reply. I wanted the American accent to drop out of the conversation, if possible, but Fate had willed it otherwise.

"I sai, y'know, awfly hard luck, you're havin' to settle down amongst these barbarians again, bai Jove!"

I am not quite sure that it's a proper term for use in a book, but by this time I was mad. There was criticism in my voice, and a distinct chill as I said composedly, "You don't do it very well."

I did not look at him, I looked at the lamp, but there was that in the air which convinced me that we had arrived at a crisis.

"I suppose not. I'm not a marquis, nor the end man at a minstrel show. I'm only an American, like sixty million other Americans, and the language of Abraham Lincoln is good enough for me. But I suppose I, like the other sixty million, emit it through my nose!"

"I should be sorry to contradict you," I said.

Arthur folded his arms and gathered himself up until he appeared to taper from his stem like a florist's bouquet, and all the upper part of him was pink and trembling with emotion. Arthur may one day attain corpulence; he is already well rounded.

"I need hardly say," he said majestically, "that when I did myself the honour of proposing, I was under the impression that I had a suitable larynx to offer you."

"You see I didn't know," I murmured, and by accident I dropped my engagement ring, which rolled upon the carpet at his feet. He stooped and picked it up.

"Shall I take this with me?" he asked, and I said "By all means."

That was all.

I gave ten minutes to reflection and to the possibility of Arthur's coming back and pleading, on his knees, to be allowed to restore that defective larynx. Then I went straight upstairs to the telephone and rang up the Central office. When they replied "Hello," I said, in the moderate and concentrated tone which we all use through telephones, "Can you give me New York?"

Poppa was