Eddy gave vent to a small whoop of delight which he immediately suppressed with a scared glance at his father.  However, he could not refrain from sniffing audibly with rapture when the first fragrance of the broiling beefsteak spread through the house to the porch.  Mrs. Carroll giggled, and so did Ina, but Charlotte looked severely at her brother.

“After all, though, the excessive tax on articles purchased by travellers abroad and brought to this country serves as a legitimate balance-wheel,” said Carroll, coolly.  One would not have thought that he was in the least conscious of what was going on around him.  “It is mostly the very wealthy who go abroad and purchase articles of foreign manufacture,” he added, gently, “and it serves to even up things a little for those who cannot go.  It marks a notch higher on the equality of possessions.”

“Equality of fiddlesticks!” said the other man.  “What the devil do the masses of the poor in this country care about the foreign works of art, anyhow?  They don’t want ’em.  And what is going to compensate this country for not possessing works of art which it will never produce here, and which would tend to the liberal education of its citizens?”

“Not many of its citizens in the broader sense would ever see those works of art when they were here and shrined in the drawing-rooms of the millionaires,” said Carroll, smiling; “and as far as that goes, the millionaires have them, anyhow.  They are not stopped by the tariff.”

“Yes, they are, too, more than you think,” declared the major; “and not the millionaires alone are defrauded.  Suppose I go over now, as I may do”—­he cast a glance at Ina—­“as I may do, I say.  Now there are things over there that I want in my home—­things that are not to be had for love nor money in this country.  Nothing of the sort is or ever will be manufactured here.  I am doing nothing whatever to injure home industries if I bring them over.  On the contrary, I am benefiting the country by bringing to it articles which are, in a way, an education which may serve as a stimulus to the growth of art here.  I enable those who can never go abroad, and to whom they will be otherwise forever unknown, an opportunity to become acquainted with them.  But I have to leave them over there because I cannot afford to pay this government for the privilege of spending my own money and gratifying my own taste.”

Anna Carroll, to cover her absorption in the beefsteak and the dinner, joined in the conversation with feminine daring of conclusion.  “I suppose,” said she, with a kind of soft sarcasm, “that the government would not need to charge so much for its citizens’ privilege of buying little foreign vases and mosaics and breastpins and little Paris frills if it did not conduct so many humanitarian wars.”

“The humanitarian wars are all right, all right,” said the major, hastily; “so far as that goes, all right.”

“I suppose,” said Mrs. Carroll, “that it would cost so much to bring home gowns from Paris that no one can do it unless they have a great deal of money.  I understand that it costs more than it did.”