“No; I am an American.”
This was my first attempt to disclaim my nationality, and each time I denied my country I, like St. Peter, suffered for it. Fair France, your lovers should be true! That is the lesson.
“Indeed,” was all he said; but I now began to enjoy my first experience of that disconcerting phenomenon, the English stare. Later on I discovered that this generally means nothing, and is, in fact, merely an inherited relic of the days when each Englishman carried his “knuckle-duster” (a weapon used in boxing), and struck the instant his neighbor's attention was diverted. It is thanks to this peculiarity that they now find themselves in possession of so large a portion of the globe, but the surviving stare is not a reassuring spectacle.
Yet I must not let him see that I was in the slightest inconvenienced by his attitude. The antidote to suspicion is candor. I was candid.
“Yes,” I said. “I am told that I do not resemble an American, but my name, at least, is good Anglo-Saxon.”
And I handed him a card prepared for such an emergency. On it I had written, “Nelson Bunyan, Esq.” If that sounded French, then I had studied philology in vain.
“I am a traveller in search of curios,” I added. “And you?”
“I am not,” he replied, with a trace of a smile and a humorous look in his blue eyes.
He was quite friendly, perfectly polite, but that was all the information about himself I could extract—“I am not,” followed by a commonplace concerning the weather. A singular type! Repressed, self-restrained, reticent, good-humoredly condescending—in a word, British.
We talked of various matters, and I did my best to pick him, like his native winkle, from the shell. Of my success here is a sample. We had (or I had) been talking of the things that were best worth a young man's study.
“And there is love,” I said. “What a field for inquiry, what variety of aspects, what practical lessons to be learned!”
He smiled at my ardor.
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