“With Servia?” asked some one politely, with the usual vague American notion of the Balkan states.  The Bulgarian’s eyes shone curiously.

“You have a sense of humor!” he said.

This man had done newspaper work in Russia and America, studied at Harvard, and he talked about our politics, theatres, universities, society generally.  It was a pity, he said, and the result of the comparative lack of critical spirit in America that Mr. Roosevelt had been a hero so long.  There were party papers mechanically printing their praise or blame—­“and then, of course, the New York Evening Post and the Springfield Republican”—­but no general intelligent criticism of ideas for a popular idol to meet and answer.  “On the whole, he’s a good influence—­but in place of something better.  It isn’t good for a man to stand so long in the bright sunshine.”

That it was impossible for the Mexicans to work out their own salvation he doubted.  “I think of Bulgaria—­surely our inheritance of Turkish rule was almost as bad, and of how the nation has responded, and of the intensive culture we had at a time when we were only a name to most western Europeans.”  He was but one of those new potentialities which every whisper from the now cloud-wrapped Continent seemed to be opening —­this tall, scholar-fighter from the comic-opera land where Mr. Shaw placed his chocolate soldiers.

In a steamer chair a frail-looking young woman in a white polo coat looked nervously out on the sea.  She was Irish and came of a fighting line—­father, uncles, and brothers in army and navy, her husband in command of a British cruiser, scouting the very steamship lane through which we were steaming.  Frail-looking, but not frail in spirit—­a fighter born, with Irish keenness and wit, she was ready to prick any balloon in sight.  She had chased about the world too long after a fighting family to care much about settling down now.  They couldn’t afford to keep a place in England and live somewhere else half the time —­“and, after all, what is there in being a cabbage?” She talked little.  “You can learn more about people merely watching them,” and she lay in her steamer chair and watched.

She could tell, merely by looking at them in their civilian’s clothes, which were army and which navy men, which “R.N.s” and which merchant-service men.  We spoke of a young lieutenant from an India artillery regiment.  “Yes—­’garrison-gunner,’” she said.  She was sorry for the German people, but the Kaiser was “quite off his rocker and had to be licked.”

War suddenly reached out for us as we came up to Mersey Bar, and an officer in khaki bellowed from the pilot-boat:  “Take down your wireless!” Down it came, and there the ship stayed for the night, while the passengers crowded about a volunteer town-crier who read from the papers that had come aboard, and, in the strange quiet that descends on an anchored steamship, asked each other how true it was that the German military bubble—­a magazine article with that title had been much read on the way over—­had burst.