speech. Involuntarily, she glanced at his delicate complexion, at
the whiteness and softness of his ungloved hand, and felt in a
subtle way this combination of the physically fine with the morally
hard, trenchant, tenacious. Close your eyes, and Arnold Jacks was a
high-bred bulldog endowed with speech; not otherwise would a game
animal of that species, advanced to a world-polity, utter his
convictions.

"You take for granted," she remarked, "that our race is the finest
fruit of civilisation."

"Certainly. Don't you?"

It's having a pretty good conceit of ourselves. Is every foreigner
who contests it a poor deluded creature? Take the best type of
Frenchman, for instance. Is he necessarily fatuous in his criticism
of us?"

"Why, of course he is. He doesn't understand us. He doesn't
understand the world. He has his place, to be sure, but that isn't
in international politics. We are the political people; we are the
ultimate rulers. Our language----"

"There's a quotation from Virgil----"

"I know. We are very like the Romans. But there are no new races to
overthrow us."

He began to sketch the future extension of Britannic lordship and
influence. Kingdoms were overthrown with a joke, continents were