Page:Traveler from Altruria, Howells, 1894.djvu/99

Rh "Is that so?" asked my new acquaintance, with perfect good temper. "Why?"

"Really, I can't say, and I don't know that I've explicit authority for my statement."

"They are worse than the English used to be," he went on. "I didn't know that there were any foreigners who looked at us in that light now. I thought the War settled all that."

I sighed. "There are a good many things that the war didn't settle so definitely as we've been used to thinking, I'm afraid. But for that matter, I fancy an Altrurian would regard the English as a little lower in the scale of savagery than ourselves even."

"Is that so? Well, that's pretty good on the English, anyway," said my companion, and he laughed with an easy satisfaction that I envied him.

"My dear!" his wife called to him from where she was sitting with the Altrurian, "I wish you would go for my shawl. I begin to feel the air a little."

"I'll go if you'll tell me where," he said, and he confided to me, "Never knows where her shawl is, one-quarter of the time."

"Well, I think I left it in the office somewhere. You might ask at the desk; or, perhaps it's in the