Page:The Aspern Papers.djvu/227

 'Well, you acted as if you didn't think much of the English.'

'Well, I don't,' said the young man.

'Agatha noticed it and she thought Sir Rufus noticed it too.'

'They have such thick hides in general that they don't notice anything. But if he is more sensitive than the others perhaps it will keep him away.'

'Would you like to wound him, Macarthy?' his mother inquired, with an accent of timid reproach.

'Wound him? I should like to kill him! Please to let Agatha know that we'll move on,' the young man added.

Mrs. Grice got up as if she were about to comply with this injunction, but she stopped in the middle of the room and asked of her son, with a quaint effort at conscientious impartiality which would have made him smile if he had been capable of smiling in such a connection, 'Don't you think that in some respects the English are a fine nation?'

'Well, yes; I like them for pale ale and notepaper and umbrellas; and I got a firstrate trunk there the other day. But I want my sister to marry one of her own people.'

'Yes, I presume it would be better,' Mrs. Grice remarked. 'But Sir Rufus has occupied very high positions in his own country.'

'I know the kind of positions he has occupied; I can tell what they were by looking at him. The more he has done of that the more intensely he represents what I don't like.'

'Of course he would stand up for England,' Mrs. Grice felt herself compelled to admit.

'Then why the mischief doesn't he do so