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They all had listened to this more or less attentively.

'It may have been accident,' Mary observed. 'It may just have blown up of its own accord.'

'No one ever thought it did that,' René replied. 'The more sinister explanation is practically uncontradicted.'

'The Americans are a nation of gangsters,' was Percy's comment, 'and you can hardly argue, because Americans were capable of such an action, that Englishmen would be liable to commit an equally foul crime.'

René laughed.

'Upon such a generalization as that "all Americans are gangsters" you cannot safely base an argument. Bryan, for instance, Vice-President in Woodrow Wilson's administration, was not a gangster. There are, let us admit, a few exceptions to the rule that all politicians are blackguards. Americans as a whole are no more gangsters than we are. Sorry.'

'No. I am sorry too. The good Americans—if there are any—are untypical.' Percy, like many of his countrymen, took up a very rigid position regarding the Yahoo on the other side of the Atlantic. The ex-professor pushed his chair back and laughed negligently.