offence,
it is to have some quality of consideration for all who cross our
path. An Englishwoman once said to Mr. Whistler that the politeness
of the French was "all on the surface," to which the artist made
reply: "And a very good place for it to be." It is this sweet surface
politeness, costing so little, counting for so much, which smooths
the roughness out of life. "The classic quality of the French
nation," says Mr. Henry James, "is sociability; a sociability which
operates in France, as it never does in England, from below upward.
Your waiter utters a greeting because, after all, something human
within him prompts him. His instinct bids him say something, and his
taste recommends that it should be agreeable."

This combination of instinct and taste--which happily is not
confined to the French, nor to waiters--produces some admirable
results, results out of all proportion to the slightness of the means
employed. It often takes but a word, a gesture, to indicate the
delicate process of adjustment. A few summers ago I was drinking tea
with friends in the gardens of the Hotel Faloria, at Cortina. At a
table near us sat two Englishmen, three Englishwomen, and an Austrian,
the wife of a Viennese councillor. They talked with animation and
in engaging accents. After a little while they arose and strolled
back to the hotel. The Englishmen, as they passed our table, stared
hard at two young girls who were of our party, stared as deliberately
and with as much freedom as if the children had been on a London
music-hall stage. The Englishwomen passed us as though we had been
invisible. They had so completely the air of seeing nothing in our
chairs that I felt myself a phantom, a ghost like Banquo's, with no
guilty eye to discern my presence at the table. Lastly came the
Austrian, who had paused to speak to a servant, and, as _she_ passed,
she gave us a fleeting smile and a slight bow, the mere shadow of
a curtsey, acknowledging our presence as human beings, to whom some
measure of recognition was due.

It was such a little thing, so lightly done, so eloquent of perfect
self-possession, and the impression it made upon six admiring
Americans was a permanent one. We fell to asking ourselves--being
honestly conscious of constraint--how each one of us would have
behaved in the Austrian lady's place, whether or not that act of
simple and sincere politeness would have been just as easy for us.
Then I called to mind one summer morn