"Just exactly, by the amazing chance, what I was myself--and what I am still, for that matter; the strangest part of all being that it doesn't interfere nearly as much as you might suppose, and that I'm in fact not nearly so different."
The way the Ambassador followed amounted--though it wasn't so wonderful in him--to inspiration. "So different as I might suppose from what you were before?"
Ralph's face became a tribute to such prompt intelligence. "I'm still a gentleman, thank God; and no bigger fool, either, than I already was. I'm not worse looking, even if I'm not better."
"You couldn't very well be better!" his companion handsomely replied.
But Ralph was now so full of the whole fact itself as scarce to appreciate the compliment. "If I'm so very much the same thing I'm still an American, you see--and not a Briton."
"I'm awfully glad of that!" the Ambassador laughed.
"Oh it's the great point--our common ground. I mean mine and his. We're both here--at the same age--for the first time, and but freshly disembarked. That is," said our young man, "we _were._" It pulled him up a little, but not, he was instantly eager to show, too much. "I'm not losing my way--it comes to the same thing."
But he had had to consider it, and the Ambassador smoked. "If that then is the case with everything, what is--or what was the difference?"
"Between us?"--Ralph was prompt. "Nothing but our age."
"But I thought you said your age was the same."
"Oh," Ralph explained, "I meant in the sense of our time, our period. That's the difference of the greater part of a century. It was then--that time ago--he came over."
There would have been a failure of verisimilitude if his host hadn't visibly wondered. "And where has he been since?"
Ralph looked an instant, from where he stood, through the window and out into the world of things less strange than those he might so well be felt to have filled the room with. But if he was grave he was not blank. "You see I don't know everything." And for a moment again he dropped.
During this lapse the Ambassador on his side smoked; to the effect of his presently saying: "Is he ninety--nine years old?"
It brought back his visitor. "No--for if he were I should be; and I'm exactly thirty, which does very well; for since I've become him, in particular, I call it young." Ralph hung fire--but really from the sense of now so interesting his auditor that keeping it up was almost a strain. Quite for himself, however, nothing was easier. "He's magnificent. He's really beautiful." That indeed made him catch himself, and this time he turned away. "What I mean is he _was!_ Before he ceased to be?"