Ordham studied her face attentively in the pause that followed. Apparently she had forgotten him, and was staring into the deep arbours beyond the river. Her profile looked hard and cruel, sharpened against the black shadow of the trees, like the fine edge of an axe. He held his breath as the expression deepened into sullen ferocity, then stood up, overturning his chair.
“I should like to know every bit of your history,” he said, “every detail.”
“I think not. Some people might have hated you the other night when you looked like all the furies, but I was the more interested. The usual does not appeal to me particularly.”
“But there is a limit! If ever I want you to hate me, I will tell you the story of my life, as they say in New York.”
“It is a bit of slang, and New York is the factory of much of the American slang and a sort of clearing-house for the rest. Does not our slang appeal to you?”
“I find it utterly meaningless,” he said candidly. “Ours is bad enough, but at least it has some point.”
“That ours has none is the whole point. It takes the sharp American wits to understand a new bit of slang or a new joke; the cryptic quality of both, indeed, has played its part in sharpening those same wits. If you are not ever on the alert over there, you go under.”
She laughed as naturally as a child, but even in her mirth she no longer betrayed the nurture of the West.
“You are so delightfully genuine! The American imitation of the British aristocrat is the funniest thing in the world. You are not unhumorous from our crude point of view, but I doubt if you could really be affected if you tried, and you never would try. And yet over there you would be thought a mass of affectations.”
“I hope I’ll never go ‘over there.’ I’ve scarcely ever met an American that I liked. The women want too much waiting on, and I always have a feeling that the men despise me.”
“Perhaps they do, understanding no type but their own; few have had the opportunity to study the men of other races. To an American the man with no capacity for work, to ‘hustle,’ no desire to fight his way to the top, simply encumbers the earth. I hope you never will go over. No matter how good an Englishman’s manners may be at home, they become abominable the moment he sets foot in the United States. Even yours might not stand the test—whatever that test is.”