They can't even have a tram run off a
line, which in England or France might kill one or two people, without its
making a holocaust of half a street full. Even in their hospitality they
are twice the size of other nations, simply too kind and generous for
words. They have loaded us with invitations; we have been out morning, noon
and night.
The thing which surprises me is they should still employ animals of normal
size; one would expect to see elephants and mammoths drawing the hansoms
and carts!
Now we are staying in a country palace with the family we met on the boat,
whom the Americans we know in England would not speak to; in fact, I am
sure they are rather hurt at our coming here; but Octavia says she prefers
to see something we do not see in England. The Van Verdens, and Courtfields
and Latours are almost like us, only they are richer and have better French
furniture. So she says she wants to see the others, the American Americans
we don't meet at home. If people are nice in themselves how can it matter
who they are or if "fashionable" or not. The whole thing is nonsense and if
you belong to a country where the longest tradition is sixteen hundred and
something, and your ancestor got there then through being a middle class
puritan, or a ne'er-do-weel shipped off to colonise a savage land, it is
too absurd to boast about ancestry or worry in the least over such things.
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