INDEX 211

MY IMPRESSIONS OF AMERICA

I: ABOARD THE CARMANIA

ABOARD THE _CARMANIA_

MARGOT NOT A NATURAL TOURIST; LACKS CURIOSITY--HEADLINES IN LONDON
COMPARED WITH HEADLINES IN NEW YORK--AMERICAN WOMEN
WORLDLY--AMERICAN MEN THE GENUINE ARTICLE

I motored to Southampton on Saturday, the 21st of January, this year,
and after saying good-bye to my husband and my son, retired to my berth
on the _Carmania_. I am a bad traveller, and had been laid up with a
sort of influenza until the day before I left London.

Kindly press people tempted me to confide in them on the ship. They
asked me if I would be back in time for Princess Mary's wedding; where
I was going when I arrived in America, and if I looked forward to my
trip. I sometimes wonder what questions I would put if I were obliged to
interview a traveller. I would ask with reluctance where they were
going, but never what they had seen, because I know I could not listen
to their answers. Everyone knows what you are likely to see if you go
for any length of time to London, Rome, Athens or the United States; and
is there a person living whose impressions you would care to hear either
upon the Coliseum, Niagara Falls, or any other of the great works of art
or of nature? On such subjects the remarks of the cleverest and
stupidest are equally inadequate and the superb vocabulary of a Ruskin
will probably not be more illuminating than what the school-boy writes
in the Visitors' Book at Niagara, "Uncle and all very much pleased."

I am inclined to think it is a mild form of vanity that makes a certain
type of rich person travel every year. I have heard these say that for
all the interest we who are left behind take in what they have seen and
heard, they might as well have remained at Brighton. Nevertheless, the
world is full of tourists; and there are a number of people who like to
pick up pieces of unimportant information without effort. The foolish
majority of these read the _Daily Mail_; the political, the _Manchester
Guardian_; the Liberals, the _Westminster Gazette_; the intellectual,
the _New Statesman_; and to pass the time on Sundays there are always
the long columns of the _Observer_ or for the credulous, the "Secret
History of the Week."

After glancing at the leading articles, the City man turns to "Round the
Markets: Home Railways firm. The Chilian Scrip reacted to 1-1