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‘How do you find out which it is?’ asked Barban dryly.
‘Why—usually everybody intelligent knows.’
‘Are you a Communist?’
‘I’m a Socialist,’ said McKisco, ‘I sympathize with Rus-
sia.’
‘Well, I’m a soldier,’ Barban answered pleasantly. ‘My
business is to kill people. I fought against the Riff because I
am a European, and I have fought the Communists because
they want to take my property from me.’
‘Of all the narrow-minded excuses,’ McKisco looked
around to establish a derisive liaison with some one else,
but without success. He had no idea what he was up against
in Barban, neither of the simplicity of the other man’s bag of
ideas nor of the complexity of his training. McKisco knew
what ideas were, and as his mind grew he was able to recog-
nize and sort an increasing number of them—but faced by a
man whom he considered ‘dumb,’ one in whom he found no
ideas he could recognize as such, and yet to whom he could
not feel personally superior, he jumped at the conclusion
that Barban was the end product of an archaic world, and as
such, worthless. McKisco’s contacts with the princely class-
es in America had impressed upon him their uncertain and
fumbling snobbery, their delight in ignorance and their de-
liberate rudeness, all lifted from the English with no regard
paid to factors that make English philistinism and rudeness
purposeful, and applied in a land where a little knowledge
and civility buy more than they do anywhere else—an at-
titude which reached its apogee in the ‘Harvard manner’
of about 1900. He thought that this Barban was of that

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