Any one who knows anything about the world will be able to guess pretty closely the nature of the brothers' meeting. Harry was sitting in the front room upstairs when his cousin Ruth, who was at the window, announced: "Here he comes, Harry." In a perfect frenzy of pleasure, embarrassment, affection and curiosity, the boy made a dash for the stairs and greeted his brother at the front door with the demonstrative words:
To which James, who for the last few minutes had been obliged to restrain himself from throwing his bag into the gutter and breaking into a run, replied:
Then they walked upstairs together and began talking rather fast about the voyage, examinations, Aunt Miriam, Spain, the Yale baseball team,--anything but what was in their hearts.
"Well, you came back without being made an earl, after all, it seems," said James a little later at lunch.
"No, but I came back a sub-freshman, which is the next best thing. There's no telling what I might have been if I'd stayed, though. Everybody was so frightfully keen on my staying over there and going to Oxford, especially Beatrice--Beatrice Carson, you know; I've written you about her? She would have made me an earl in a minute, if she could, to make me stay. None of it did any good, though. I would be a Yankee."
"How do you think you'll like being a Yankee again?" asked James. "You certainly don't look much like one at present."
"No? That'll come, I dare say. My heart's in the right place. Though that doesn't prevent the Americans from seeming strange, at first. Did you notice that woman in the chemist's shop this morning, Aunt C.? She was chewing gum all the time she waited on you, and she never said 'Thank you' or 'Ma'am' once."
"They all are that way," said Aunt Cecilia with a gentle sigh. "I don't expect anything else."
"Oh, the bloated aristocrat!" said James. "It is an earl, after all. Only don't blame the poor girl for not calling you 'My lord.' She couldn't be expected to know; they don't have many of them over here."
"I don't mean that she was rude," said Harry; "she didn't give that impression, somehow. It was just the way she did things; a sort of casualness. The Americans are a funny people!"
"Oh, Lord!" groaned James; "hear the prominent foreigner talk. What do you think of America, my lord? How do you like New York? What do you think of our climate? To think that that's the thing I used to spank when he was naughty!"