‘I’ve read all that a hundred times,’ quoth Tuckham bluntly.

’So have I. I speak of it because I see it.  We scoff at the simplicity of the Germans.’

’The Germans live in simple fashion, because they’re poor.  French vanity’s pretty and amusing.  I don’t know whether it’s deep in them, for I doubt their depth; but I know it’s in their joints.  The first spring of a Frenchman comes of vanity.  That you can’t say of the English.  Peace to all! but I abhor cosmopolitanism.  No man has a firm foothold who pretends to it.  None despises the English in reality.  Don’t be misled, Miss Halkett.  We’re solid:  that is the main point.  The world feels our power, and has confidence in our good faith.  I ask for no more.’

’With Germans we are supercilious Celts; with Frenchmen we are sneering Teutons:—­Can we be loved, Mr. Tuckham?’

’That’s a quotation from my friend Lydiard.  Loved?  No nation ever was loved while it lived.  As Lydiard says, it may be a good beast or a bad, but a beast it is.  A nation’s much too big for refined feelings and affections.  It must be powerful or out of the way, or down it goes.  When a nation’s dead you may love it; but I don’t see the use of dying to be loved.  My aim for my country is to have the land respected.  For that purpose we must have power; for power wealth; for wealth industry; for industry internal peace:  therefore no agitation, no artificial divisions.  All’s plain in history and fact, so long as we do not obtrude sentimentalism.  Nothing mixes well with that stuff—­except poetical ideas!’

Contrary to her anticipation, Cecilia was thrown more into companionship with Mr. Tuckham than with Mr. Austin; and though it often vexed her, she acknowledged that she derived a benefit from his robust antagonism of opinion.  And Italy had grown tasteless to her.  She could hardly simulate sufficient curiosity to serve for a vacant echo to Mr. Austin’s historic ardour.  Pliny the Younger might indeed be the model of a gentleman of old Rome; there might be a scholarly pleasure in calculating, as Mr. Austin did, the length of time it took Pliny to journey from the city to his paternal farm, or villa overlooking the lake, or villa overlooking the bay, and some abstruse fun in the tender ridicule of his readings of his poems to friends; for Mr. Austin smiled effusively in alluding to the illustrious Roman pleader’s foible of verse:  but Pliny bore no resemblance to that island barbarian Nevil Beauchamp:  she could not realize the friend of Trajan, orator, lawyer, student, statesman, benefactor of his kind, and model of her own modern English gentleman, though he was.  ‘Yes!’ she would reply encouragingly to Seymour Austin’s fond brooding hum about his hero; and ‘Yes!’ conclusively:  like an incarnation of stupidity dealing in monosyllables.  She was unworthy of the society of a scholar.  Nor could she kneel at the feet of her especial heroes:  Dante, Raphael, Buonarotti:  she was unworthy of them.  She longed to be at Mount Laurels.  Mr. Tuckham’s conversation was the nearest approach to it—­as it were round by Greenland; but it was homeward.