How would you interpret this sentence? How would you interpret this sentence ‘You most certainly could not tell a damned thing about an American’ in the last passage? I would interpret it as you really can’t know anything about an American. What do you think? Thank you. The excerpt is taken from the short story ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ written by Ernest Hemingway.The excerpt: “I’m sorry,” Macomber (the client and an American) said and looked at him with his American face that would stay adolescent until it became middle-aged, and Wilson( a white hunter) noted his crew-cropped hair, fine eyes only faintly shifty, good nose, thin lips and handsome jaw. “I’m sorry I didn’t realize that. There are lots of things I don’t know.” So what could he do, Wilson thought. He was all ready to break it off quickly and neatly and here the beggar was apologizing after he had just insulted him. He made one more attempt. “Don’t worry about me talking,” he said. “I have a living to make You know in Africa no woman ever misses her lion and no white man ever bolts.” “I bolted like a rabbit,” Macomber said. Now what in hell were you going to do about a man who talked like that, Wilson wondered. Wilson looked at Macomber with his flat, blue, machine-gunner’s eyes and the other smiled back at him. He had a pleasant smile if you did not notice how his eyes showed when he was hurt. “Maybe I can fix it up on buffalo,” he said. “We’re after them next, aren’t we?” “In the morning if you like,” Wilson told him. Perhaps he had been wrong. This was certainly the way to take it. You most certainly could not tell a damned thing about an American. He was all for Macomber again. If you could forget the morning. But, of course, you couldn’t. The morning had been about as bad as they come.