“The American young woman is at present a factor which is without doubt to be counted with,” Lord Dunholm put the matter without lightness.  “Any young woman is a factor, but the American young woman just now—­just now——­” He paused a moment as though considering.  “It did not seem at all necessary to count with them at first, when they began to appear among us.  They were generally curiously exotic, funny little creatures with odd manners and voices.  They were often most amusing, and one liked to hear them chatter and see the airy lightness with which they took superfluous, and sometimes unsuperfluous, conventions, as a hunter takes a five-barred gate.  But it never occurred to us to marry them.  We did not take them seriously enough.  But we began to marry them—­we began to marry them, my good fellow!”

The final words broke forth with such a suggestion of sudden anxiety that, in spite of himself, Westholt laughed involuntarily, and his father, turning to look at him, laughed also.  But he recovered his seriousness.

“It was all rather a muddle at first,” he went on.  “Things were not fairly done, and certain bad lots looked on it as a paying scheme on the one side, while it was a matter of silly, little ambitions on the other.  But that it is an extraordinary country there is no sane denying—­huge, fabulously resourceful in every way—­area, variety of climate, wealth of minerals, products of all sorts, soil to grow anything, and sun and rain enough to give each thing what it needs; last, or rather first, a people who, considered as a nation, are in the riot of youth, and who began by being English—­which we Englishmen have an innocent belief is the one method of ‘owning the earth.’  That figure of speech is an Americanism I carefully committed to memory.  Well, after all, look at the map—­look at the map!  There we are.”

They had frequently discussed together the question of the development of international relations.  Lord Dunholm, a man of far-reaching and clear logic, had realised that the oddly unaccentuated growth of intercourse between the two countries might be a subject to be reflected on without lightness.

“The habit we have of regarding America and Americans as rather a joke,” he had once said, “has a sort of parallel in the condescendingly amiable amusement of a parent at the precocity or whimsicalness of a child.  But the child is shooting up amazingly—­amazingly.  In a way which suggests divers possibilities.”

The exchange of visits between Dunholm and Stornham had been rare and formal.  From the call made upon the younger Lady Anstruthers on her marriage, the Dunholms had returned with a sense of puzzled pity for the little American bride, with her wonderful frock and her uneasy, childish eyes.  For some years Lady Anstruthers had been too delicate to make or return calls.  One heard painful accounts of her apparent wretched ill-health and of the condition of her husband’s estate.