feeling free to be disagreeable to each other because we are
relations, and yet feeling especially resentful because it's a relation
who is being disagreeable. I merely put the point to you, I lay no dogma
down concerning members of the family; but I am perfectly sure that
discretion is a quality more common to the French than to ourselves or
our relations: I mean something a little more than discretion, I mean
esprit de conduits, for which it is hard to find a translation.

Upon my first two points, the right to privacy and the mother-tongue, I
have lingered long, feeling these to be not only of prime importance and
wide application, but also to be quite beyond my power to make lucid in
short compass. I trust that they have been made lucid. I must now get
on to further anecdotes, illustrating other and less subtle causes of
misunderstanding; and I feel somewhat like the author of Don Juan
when he exclaims that he almost wishes he had ne'er begun that very
remarkable poem. I renounce all pretense to the French virtue of
discretion.

Evening dress has been the source of many irritations. Englishmen did
not appear to think that they need wear it at American dinner parties.
There was a good deal of this at one time. During that period an
Englishman, who had brought letters to a gentleman in Boston and in
consequence had been asked to dinner, entered the house of his host in a
tweed suit. His host, in evening dress of course, met him in the hall.

"Oh, I see," said the Bostonian, "that you haven't your dress suit with
you. The man will take you upstairs and one of mine will fit you well
enough. We'll wait."

In England, a cricketer from Philadelphia, after the match at Lord's,
had been invited to dine at a great house with the rest of his eleven.
They were to go there on a coach. The American discovered after arrival
that he alone of the eleven had not brought a dress suit with him. He
asked his host what he was to do.

"I advise you to go home," said the host.

The moral here is not that all hosts in England would have treated a
guest so, or that all American hosts would have met the situation so
well as that Boston gentleman: but too many English used to be socially
brutal--quite as much so to each other as to us, or any one. One should
bear that in mind. I know of nothing more English in its way than what
Eton answered to Beaumont (I think) when Beaumont sent a challenge to
play cricket: "Harrow we know, and Rugby