«The British Barbarians»

It'll make intercourse with your Englishmen so much more easy."

    By this time Philip's curiosity was thoroughly whetted. "But you're not an Englishman, you say?" he asked, with a little natural hesitation.

    "No, not exactly what you call an Englishman," the stranger replied, as if he didn't quite care for such clumsy attempts to examine his antecedents. "As I tell you, I'm an Alien. But we always spoke English at home," he added with an afterthought, as if ready to vouchsafe all the other information that lay in his power.

    "You can't be an American, I'm sure," Philip went on, unabashed, his eagerness to solve the question at issue, once raised, getting the better for the moment of both reserve and politeness.

    "No, I'm certainly not an American," the stranger answered with a gentle courtesy in his tone that made Philip feel ashamed of his rudeness in questioning him.

    "Nor a Colonist?" Philip asked once more, unable to take the hint.

    "Nor a Colonist either," the Alien replied curtly. And then he relapsed into a momentary silence which threw upon Philip the difficult task of continuing the conversation.

    The member of Her Britannic Majesty's Civil Service would have given anything just that minute to say to him frankly, "Well, if you're not an Englishman, and you're not an American, and you're not a Colonist, and you ARE an Alien, and yet you talk English like a native, and have always talked it, why, what in the name of goodness do you want us to take you for?" But he restrained himself with difficulty. There was something about the stranger that made him feel by instinct it would be more a breach of etiquette to question him closely than to question any one he had ever met with.

    They walked on along the road for some minutes together, the stranger admiring all the way the golden tresses of the laburnum and the rich perfume of the lilac, and talking much as he went of the quaintness and prettiness of the suburban houses. Philip thought them pretty, too (or rather, important), but failed to see for his own part where the quaintness came in. Nay, he took the imputation as rather a slur on so respectable a neighbourhood: for to be quaint is to be picturesque, and to be picturesque is to be old-fashioned. But the stranger's voice and manner were so pleasant, almost so ingratiating, that Philip did not care to differ from him on the abstract question of a qualifying epithet. After all, there's nothing positively insulting in calling a house quaint, though Philip would certainly have preferred, himself, to hear the Eligible Family Residences of that Aristocratic Neighbourhood described in auctioneering phrase as "imposing," "noble," "handsome," or "important-looking.