Page:The Sense of the Past (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/112

 "You couldn't very well be better!" his companion handsomely replied.

But Ralph was now so full of the whole fact itself as scarce to appreciate the compliment. "If I'm so very much the same thing I'm still an American, you see—and not a Briton."

"I'm awfully glad of that!" the Ambassador laughed.

"Oh it's the great point—our common ground. I mean mine and his. We're both here—at the same age—for the first time, and but freshly disembarked. That is," said our young man, "we were." It pulled him up a little, but not, he was instantly eager to show, too much. "I'm not losing my way—it comes to the same thing."

But he had had to consider it, and the Ambassador smoked. "If that then is the case with everything, what is—or what was the difference?"

"Between us?"—Ralph was prompt. "Nothing but our age."

"But I thought you said your age was the same."

"Oh," Ralph explained, "I meant in the sense of our time, our period. That's the difference of the greater part of a century. It was then—that time ago—he came over."

There would have been a failure of verisimilitude if his host hadn't visibly wondered. "And where has he been since?"

Ralph looked an instant, from where he stood, 98