This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
I MEET AN A.D.C.
225

did not, anyway he took a long time telling her. I looked round when we got to the end of the road and they were still standing talking. My opinion of that prim young man went up straight away. There must have been something in him to keep a hungry American woman away from an eating-house even that space of time.

'An eating-house!' said Berengaria, with fine scorn. 'Anyone would think we were a lot of animals at the Zoo. What a mercy you don't talk like that, Nicola. But I suppose Americans are not all of one jat, any more than we are?'

'I guess not,' I said, not knowing in the least what a jat was, but knowing full well that we Americans are not just all of one anything.

There are just a few millions of people in the States when they are all totalled up, and I guess we are about the most diversified nation on earth. Pretty well every country on the face of the globe has helped to swell our population, so we are what you might call a mixed race. But it's a very good mixture, and when we shake down a bit a few centuries hence we shall just about head the list among the most thriving and energetic nations on earth. The old nations want new blood. We are all new blood, and we shall be all the better when we have been kept a bit longer.

Lady Manifold and Marjory had not arrived, we discovered, when at last we found the Information Bureau, which turned out to be a tiny tent containing a tiny Babu in white drill, whose information was about all you could expect from the