in from his head when you wanted one; he had them stuck in
his pad of white wooly hair: "Always handy then, Missie," he would say.

"Ask them to sing 'Sweet Violets,' Uncle Tom."

He was acting as a sort of master of the ceremonies at the entertainment
the servants were giving me.

"Don't think they know dat, Miss Olly."

"Why, I heard them singing it the other night!" And she hummed the tune.

"Oh, dat was 'Sweet Vio-_letts_,' Miss Olly!"

Washington was the first city I had seen in America where the people did
not hurry, and where the social life did not seem entirely the work of
women. The men asserted themselves here as something more than machines
in the background untiringly turning out the dollars, while their wives
and daughters give luncheons and teas at which only women are present.

Beautifully as the women dress, they talk very little about clothes. I
was much struck by their culture--by the evidences that they had read
far more and developed a more fastidious taste than most young
Englishwomen. Yet it is all mixed up with extraordinary naivete. The
vivacity, the appearance, at least, of _reality_, the animation, the
energy of American women delighted me. They are very sympathetic, too,
in spite of a certain callousness which comes of regarding everything in
life, even love, as "lots of fun." I did not think that they, or the men
either, had much natural sense of beauty. They admire beauty in a
curious way through their intellect. Nearly every American girl has a
cast of the winged Victory of the Louvre in her room. She makes it a
point of her _education_ to admire it.

There! I am beginning to generalize--the very thing I was resolute to
avoid. How silly to generalize about a country which embraces such
extremes of climate as the sharp winters of Boston and New York and the
warm winds of Florida which blow through palms and orange groves!

XII

SOME LIKES AND DISLIKES

It is only human to make comparisons between American and English
institutions, although they are likely to turn out as odious as the
proverb says! The first institution in America that distressed me was
the steam heat. It is far more manageable now than it was both in hotels
and theaters, because there are more individual heaters. But how I
suffered from it at first I cannot describe! I used to feel dreadfully
ill, and when we could not turn the heat off at the theater, the plays
always went badly. My voice was affected t