nd it stirs a little
of the faith of your fathers that is deep down within you to have to
have it taken for granted that you are an Episcopalian when really you
are an old-fashioned Philadelphia Quaker.

But these things have to be done; it is the cock that the whole of this
society owes to AEsculapius.

And the odd, queer thing is that the whole collection of rules applies
to anybody--to the anybodies that you meet in hotels, in railway trains,
to a less degree, perhaps, in steamers, but even, in the end, upon
steamers. You meet a man or a woman and, from tiny and intimate sounds,
from the slightest of movements, you know at once whether you are
concerned with good people or with those who won't do. You know, this
is to say, whether they will go rigidly through with the whole programme
from the underdone beef to the Anglicanism. It won't matter whether they
be short or tall; whether the voice squeak like a marionette or rumble
like a town bull's; it won't matter whether they are Germans, Austrians,
French, Spanish, or even Brazilians--they will be the Germans or
Brazilians who take a cold bath every morning and who move, roughly
speaking, in diplomatic circles.

But the inconvenient--well, hang it all, I will say it--the damnable
nuisance of the whole thing is, that with all the taking for granted,
you never really get an inch deeper than the things I have catalogued.

I can give you a rather extraordinary instance of this. I can't remember
whether it was in our first year--the first year of us four at Nauheim,
because, of course, it would have been the fourth year of Florence and
myself--but it must have been in the first or second year. And that
gives the measure at once of the extraordinariness of our discussion and
of the swiftness with which intimacy had grown up between us. On the one
hand we seemed to start out on the expedition so naturally and with
so little preparation, that it was as if we must have made many such
excursions before; and our intimacy seemed so deep....

Yet the place to which we went was obviously one to which Florence at
least would have wanted to take us quite early, so that you would
almost think we should have gone there together at the beginning of our
intimacy. Florence was singularly expert as a guide to archaeological
expeditions and there was nothing she liked so much as taking people
round ruins and showing you the window from which some one looked down
upon the murder of some