THE SENSE OF THE PAST
quite broken off. Nothing can have passed between us, I make out, for at least twenty years; during which"—for that also came to him—"we lost every remnant of the credit originally enjoyed with you all by the stiffness of our stand on your side during the dreadful War."
She took this from him with a clear competence that yet didn't belittle his own—though his own, it might be added, was to indulge, the very next thing, in a throb of finer complacency. She stared a moment before saying, as she did with much point, that she hadn't heard of any American who when their capital fell before the British arms had given them any credit for anything; on which remark he commented in turn, smiling at what she appeared to have meant. "Don't you happen to have heard, my dear, of the great revolutionary struggle with your poor mad old king, now at his last gasp as they tell me, through which my country won the independence it enjoys?"
He thought he had never in life seen anything handsomer than the way Miss Midmore had of tossing her head with a spirit and an air that might have been partly a fruit of breeding and partly an extravagance of humour. It made him note even at the moment that he had really in New York never seen a head prescriptively tossed; or never at least with that high grace; in spite of its being withal supposed there that the young American ladies were unsurpassed in their frank
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