Page:A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales (1875).djvu/237

Rh there and wish never to go. I should never get on with the—" I wondered what she was going to say; the fogs, the smoke, or whist with six-penny stakes?—"I should never get on," she said, "with the Aristocracy! I'm a fierce democrat, I'm not ashamed of it. I hold opinions which would make my ancestors turn in their graves. I was born in the lap of feudalism. I'm a daughter of the crusaders. But I'm a revolutionist! I have a passion for freedom, boundless, infinite, ineffable freedom. It's to your great country I should like to go. I should like to see the wonderful spectacle of a great people free to do everything it chooses, and yet never doing anything wrong!"

I replied, modestly, that, after all, both our freedom and our virtue had their limits, and she turned quickly about and shook her fan with a dramatic gesture at Pickering. "No matter, no matter!" she cried, "I should like to see the country which produced that wonderful young man. I think of it as a sort of Arcadia, a land of the golden age. He's so delightfully innocent! In this stupid old Germany, if a young man is innocent, he's a fool; he has no brains; he's not a bit interesting. But Mr. Pickering says the most naïf things, and after I have laughed five minutes at their simplicity, it suddenly occurs to me that they are very wise, and I think them