Page:Rudyard Kipling - A diversity of creatures.djvu/294

282 'Always. It saves trouble.'

'Now that's just what I find so significant among the English '—this was Alice's mother, I think, with one elbow well forward among the salted almonds. 'Oh, I know how you feel, Madam Burton, but a Northerner like myself—I'm Buffalo—even though we come over every year—notices the desire for comfort in England. There's so little conflict or uplift in British society.'

'But we like being comfortable,' I said. 'I know it. It's very characteristic. But ain't it a little, just a little, lacking in adaptability an' imagination?'

'They haven't any need for adaptability,' Madam Burton struck in. 'They haven't any Ellis Island standards to live up to.'

'But we can assimilate,' the Buffalo woman charged on.

'Now you have done it!' I whispered to the old lady as the blessed word 'assimilation' woke up all the old arguments for and against.

There was not a dull moment in that dinner for me—nor afterwards when the boys and girls at the piano played the rag-time tunes of their own land, while their elders, inexhaustibly interested, replunged into the discussion of that land's future, till there was talk of coon-can. When all the company had been set to tables Zigler led me into his book-lined study, where I noticed he kept his golf-clubs, and spoke simply as a child, gravely as a bishop, of the years that were past since our last meeting. ..