Page:Ruth of the U.S.A. (IA ruthofusa00balm).pdf/91

 ably Hubert Lennon—who undoubtedly had had her placed at this table—had reminded Captain Forraker about her. His three table-companions arose and Captain Forraker presented them to her; they were all English—two young officers and one older man, in rank a colonel, who had been about some ordnance inspection work in America. Ruth sat down; they sat down and resumed their talk; and Ruth got the first of her morning amazements. She was in a foreign land, already; she was not just on the way there, though still in sight of Long Island. She was now in Europe, with Europeans thinking and talking, not as guests of America, but as Europeans at home again.

Ruth had been brought up, as a good American, to believe her country the greatest in the world; and, implicitly, she believed it. She recognized that sons and daughters of other nations likewise were reared to believe their native land the best and their people the noblest; but she never had been able to quite believe that they really could think so. They must make an exception, down deep in their consciousness, for America, she was sure; however loyal they might be to their own institutions and to their own fellows, they must admire more highly the American ideals of freedom and democracy, and they must consider that the people who lived by and for those ideals were potentially, at least, the greatest.

It was a momentous experience, therefore, to hear her country discussed—not in an unfriendly way or even with prejudice, but by open-minded foreigners trying to inform one another of the facts about America as they had found them; America was a huge but quite untried quantity;