Alfred could tell that he was making Evander uncomfortable, and he took a small degree of satisfaction in the fact, though he knew he shouldn't have. Alfred had spent a good deal of time since his return to England making very conscious, deliberate choices to prevent people from feeling uncomfortable, tailoring his behavior to their appetites, and it was liberating to have an opportunity to just not care, for once, that his conversation, his demeanor, his livelihood, his experiences, his whole life was not exactly appropriate for the dinner table. Responses occurred to him immediately to push the envelope a little farther. He could have said, for instance, without it even being much of a stretch at all, that he didn't particularly care to be better integrated, because the majority of the country was made up of small-minded boars with no imagination and no sense of what the real world — not just within the confines of the British Isles but the whole world — was really like. He could have launched into a series of stories to showcase just how differently things were done in other areas of the world (not just the tribe he'd lived with as a castaway, but India and the Far East and Africa too), to illustrate just how little it mattered that he integrate and become just another boring Englishman — but that might have shocked Evander to death, which would have put a rather morbid end to their holiday dinner.

However satisfying that might have been, however, he knew that Evander didn't deserve that. Whatever he said or thought, Alfred was confident that he meant well, and saying something controversial just for the sake of it would not be the most brotherly way to repay the sentiment. So instead, he chose a different tactic, which he thought Evander might appreciate given his own values and priorities: the career approach.

"This is what I'm good at," he said calmly. "I don't have the skills to do anything else."

(Of course, one could argue that given his experience on the Sycorax expedition it would be hard to make the case that he was good at being an explorer — but he had survived, when dozens of others had died, so — relatively speaking, he was doing quite well).