"No, it's more as if one were a rat, I think," he said. "It does make me a little uncomfortable, though not because my vanity is upset by the ladies thinking so ill of me."
"What then?"
"Well—" he pondered a moment—"there's a provincialism about them that seems abysmal—belonging to an age more primeval than those ages of goats and camels you mentioned. I suppose the inhibitions I dislike most are those of provincialism; and here are actually white and rather fine-looking people so stonily, so anciently provincial that they don't even recognize us as belonging to their own species." He told her to look at a tall man observing them from the hillside they were just then rounding. "See that fellow. He's actually fair; his eyes are blue and his hair is almost a light brown under that wisp of gray rag about his head, and his moustache is reddish. You could take that chap to a tailor's and a haberdasher's and a barber's and have him done for the perfect picture of a New York or London club window—all except his eyes. They're too primitive, too abysmally provincial. His eyes would keep him out of any club, because it's the very essence of provincialism that the provincial soul, in excluding the
