hat still irritates me most against the hero of the
popular novel is the ease with which he learns a modern foreign language.
Were he a German waiter, a Swiss barber, or a Polish photographer, I
would not envy him; these people do not have to learn a language. My
idea is that they boil down a dictionary, and take two table-spoonsful
each night before going to bed. By the time the bottle is finished they
have the language well into their system. But he is not. He is just an
ordinary Anglo-Saxon, and I don't believe in him. I walk about for years
with dictionaries in my pocket. Weird-looking ladies and gentlemen
gesticulate and rave at me for months. I hide myself in lonely places,
repeating idioms to myself out loud, in the hope that by this means they
will come readily to me if ever I want them, which I never do. And,
after all this, I don't seem to know very much. This irritating ass, who
has never left his native suburb, suddenly makes up his mind to travel on
the Continent. I find him in the next chapter engaged in complicated
psychological argument with French or German _savants_. It appears--the
author had forgotten to mention it before--that one summer a French, or
German, or Italian refugee, as the case may happen to be, came to live in
the hero's street: thus it is that the hero is able to talk fluently in
the native language of that unhappy refugee.

I remember a melodrama visiting a country town where I was staying. The
heroine and child were sleeping peacefully in the customary attic. For
some reason not quite clear to me, the villain had set fire to the house.
He had been complaining through the three preceding acts of the heroine's
coldness; maybe it was with some idea of warming her. Escape by way of
the staircase was impossible. Each time the poor girl opened the door a
flame came in and nearly burned her hair off. It seemed to have been
waiting for her.

"Thank God!" said the lady, hastily wrapping the child in a sheet, "that
I was brought up a wire walker."

Without a moment's hesitation she opened the attic window and took the
nearest telegraph wire to the opposite side of the street.

In the same way, apparently, the hero of the popular novel, finding
himself stranded in a foreign land, suddenly recollects that once upon a
time he met a refugee, and at once begins to talk. I have met refugees
myself. The only thing they have ever taught me is not to leave my
brandy flask about.