"I suppose they told you all about it?" Sir William made no more effort than Madge to disguise his desire to know the worst.
"Oh, they told me one or two things. It's been no worse for them than for some of the foreigners over here," was the unfilial answer which Napier challenged on other grounds. Napier had the facts of the ill-treatment of English _Kurgäst_ from the Foreign Office.
Julian lolled in his chair. People made a great deal of a little inconvenience, he said, especially the type of person who was a _Kurgäst_. It was a speech that did him no good in that company--being far too much like a reflection upon a highly esteemed pair of whom their son should speak with an even greater respect than the ordinary person.
Napier, who knew Julian's devotion to his parents, was morally certain that Lady McIntyre was thinking at that moment of those shining lights of filial duty, Mr. Carl and Mr. Ernst Pforzheim. _They_ would never cast such a reflection upon their revered Papa as to suggest he was a little fussy about small comforts. No, it wasn't nice of Julian.
So little did Julian recognize this, he was asking if anybody seriously thought inconvenience was avoidable in the vast upheaval of war? He only wished that inconvenience was the worst that any of them might have to complain of. A second time he tripped up those "Foreign Office facts" of Gavan's. Julian knew about those "facts." "And I know certain others. _They_ relate to ill-treatment too. Facts more easily examined. No trouble about subjecting those facts to every sort of test! Why? Because they were nearer home. Yet I doubt if the Foreign Office makes any note of them. _I_ have--in haphazard way. But enough to sober any man." He produced two or three. Instances of harsh dismissal at a time when fresh employment was known to be impossible. Instances of boycott, of petty persecution, all because of a foreign name. It was the kind of attempt at sober balancing still possible even under the roof of a British official. A willingness as yet unshackled to see and to criticize these spots on the national sun, was accounted an attitude of mind peculiarly, proudly, British. If this particular circle was readier than most to admit these minor blames, it was largely because of sympathy with the particular German who was in their midst. A form of hospitality.