第18章

"He asked if he might come and continue our `stimulating' conversation, and as Lady Baird was standing by I could hardly say no. I am sure of one thing: that before I finish with him I will widen his horizon so that he will be able to see something beside Scotland and his little insignificant Fifeshire parish! I told him our country parishes in America were ten times as large as his. He said he had heard that they covered a good deal of territory, and that the ministers' salaries were sometimes paid in pork and potatoes. That shows you the style of his retorts!"

"I really cannot decide which of you was the more disagreeable," said Salemina; "if he calls, I shall not remain in the room."

"I wouldn't gratify him by staying out," retorted Francesca. "He is extremely good for the circulation; I think I was never so warm in my life as when I talked with him; as physical exercise he is equal to bicycling. The bridge man is coming to call, too. I made him a diagram of Breadalbane Terrace, and a plan of the hall and staircase, on my dinner-card. He was distinctly ungrateful; in fact, he remarked that he had been born in this very house, but would not trust himself to find his way upstairs with my plan as a guide. He also said the American vocabulary was vastly amusing, so picturesque, unstudied, and fresh."

"That was nice, surely," I interpolated.

"You know perfectly well that it was an insult."

"Francesca is very like that young man," laughed Salemina, "who, whenever he engaged in controversy, seemed to take off his flesh and sit in his nerves."

"I'm not supersensitive," replied Francesca, "but when one's vocabulary is called picturesque by a Britisher, one always knows he is thinking of cowboys and broncos. However, I shifted the weight into the other scale by answering `Thank you. And your phraseology is just as unusual to us.' `Indeed?' he said with some surprise.

`I supposed our method of expression very sedate and uneventful.'

`Not at all,' I returned, `when you say, as you did a moment ago, that you never eat potato to your fish.' `But I do not,' he urged obtusely. `Very likely,' I argued, `but the fact is not of so much importance as the preposition. Now I eat potato WITH my fish.'

`You make a mistake,' he said, and we both laughed in spite of ourselves, while he murmured, `eating potato WITH fish--how extraordinary.' Well, the bridge man may not add perceptibly to the gaiety of the nations, but he is better than the Reverend Ronald. I forgot to say that when I chanced to be speaking of doughnuts, that `unconquer'd Scot' asked me if a doughnut resembled a peanut? Can you conceive such ignorance?"

"I think you were not only aggressively American, but painfully provincial," said Salemina, with some warmth. "Why in the world should you drag doughnuts into a dinner-table conversation in Edinburgh? Why not select topics of universal interest?"

"Like the Currie Brig or the shade of Montrose," I murmured slyly.

"To one who has ever eaten a doughnut, the subject is of transcendent interest; and as for one who has not--well, he should be made to feel his limitations," replied Francesca, with a yawn.

"Come, let us forget our troubles in sleep; it is after midnight."