At such times a call
from a gentleman of her own nation, even
though he were one of the placidly stupid type,
would be a positive relief; she could abandon
herself to the secure sense of being at home;
she need fear no surprises, and in the smooth
shallows of their talk there were no unsuspected
depths to excite and to baffle her ingenuity.
And, again, reverting in her thought to Halfdan,
his conversational brilliancy would almost
repel her, as something odious and un-American,
the cheap result of outlandish birth and
unrepublican education. Not that she had ever
valued republicanism very highly; she was one
of those who associated politics with noisy
vulgarity in speech and dress, and therefore
thanked fortune that women were permitted to
keep aloof from it. But in the presence of this
alien she found herself growing patriotic; that
much-discussed abstraction, which we call our
country (and which is nothing but the aggregate
of all the slow and invisible influences
which go toward making up our own being),
became by degrees a very palpable and
intelligible fact to her.
Frequently while her American self was thus
loudly asserting itself, Edith inflicted many a
cruel wound upon her foreign adorer. Once,--
it was the Fourth of July, more than a year after
Halfdan's arrival, a number of young ladies and
gentlemen, after having listened to a patriotic
oration, were invited in to an informal luncheon.
While waiting, they naturally enough spent their
time in singing national songs, and Halfdan's
clear tenor did good service in keeping the
straggling voices together.
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