Whenever the conversation showed a tendency to linger on politics, Mrs. Copley adroitly redirected it, as she knew from experience that the subject was too combustible by far for a dinner-party.
'Italy, Italy! These men talk nothing but Italy,' she complained to the young Frenchman on her right. 'Does it not make you homesick for the boulevards?'
'I suffered the nostalgie once,' he confessed, 'but Rome is a good cure.'
Marcia shook her head in mock despair. 'And you, too, M. Benoit! Patriotism is certainly dying out.'
'Oh, I know I'm abnormally patriotic,' she admitted; 'but you're all so sluggish in that respect, that you force it upon one.'
'There are other useful virtues besides patriotism,' Sybert suggested.
'Wait until you have spent a spring in the Sabine hills, Miss Copley,' Melville put in, 'and you will be as bad as the rest of us.'
'Ah, mademoiselle,' Benoit added fervently, 'spring-time in the Sabine hills will be compensation sufficient to most of us for not seeing paradise.'
'I believe, with my uncle, it's a kind of Roman fever!' she cried. 'I never expected to hear a Frenchman renounce his native land.'
'It is not that I renounce France,' the young man remonstrated. 'I lofe France as much as ever, but I open my arms to Italy as well. To lofe another land and peoples besides your own makes you, not littler, but, as you say, wider--broader. We are--we are---- Ah, mademoiselle!' he broke off, 'if you would let me talk in French I could say what I mean; but how can one be eloquent in this halting tongue of yours?'
'_Coraggio_, Benoit! You are doing bravely,' Sybert laughed.
'We are,' the young man went on with a sudden inspiration, 'what you call in English, citizens of the world. You, mademoiselle, are American, La Signora Contessa is Italian, Mr. Carthrope is English, I am French, but we are all citizens of the same world, and in whatever land we find ourselves, there we recognize one another for brothers, and are always at home; for it is still the world.'
The young man's eloquence was received with an appreciative laugh. 'And how about paradise?' some one suggested.
'Ah, my friends, it is there that we will be strangers!' Benoit returned tragically.
'Citizens of the world,' Sybert turned the stem of his wine glass meditatively as he repeated the phrase. 'It seems to me, in spite of Miss Marcia, that one can't do much better than that. If you're a patriotic citizen of the world, I should think you'd done your duty by mankind, and might reasonably expect to reap a reward in Benoit's paradise.'