r!

After dinner, while we were having heavenly Turkish coffee in the
fountain court, who should come but Mr. Doremus. It seemed to me a
funny time to call, but apparently the others didn't think it out of
the way. He wanted us to go to some theatre on a roof, and I should
have loved it, especially when Mrs. Ess Kay said you didn't get smudges
on your nose as you would if you sat on a roof in London--a thing which
I never heard of anybody except cats doing. But she was tired, and I
suppose it would have been ladylike for me to be, only I was much too
excited. So Mr. Doremus stayed, and he and Mr. Parker talked more slang
in an hour than I think I ever heard in my whole life, though I have
always considered Stan talented in that way.

But Stan's slang, and Vic's, are quite different from American slang.
In America, you build up your whole conversation out of it, and it's
wonderful. I longed for a notebook while those two men were talking, to
put everything down, and I felt, if people were often going to be as
funny as that, I should need to go home soon to rest my features. I'm
not sure whether Americans really think funnier things than English
people do, but their funny ideas are startlingly unlike ours. Somehow
they seem younger and more bubbling. When I go home, I shall probably
have collected so much slang in my pores that I shall talk about
putting on my "glad rags" when I'm going to dress for dinner; my life
will be my "natural"; I shall call Stan's motor car the Blue Assassin
or the Homicide Wagon; I shall say my best frocks are "mighty
conducive"; I shall get bored by poor Mr. Duckworth, our newest curate,
and tell him he's "the limit"; I may even take to abbreviating my
affirmatives and negatives by saying "Yep" and "Nope" when I'm in a
hurry; but if I do fall into these ways, I tremble to think what may be
the effect on Mother.

IV

ABOUT SHOPPING AND MEN

"Why, Betty, you never told me you were interviewed on the dock." These
were the first words Mrs. Ess Kay said to me as I walked in to
breakfast, a little late because of a wrestle I had had with a
different and even more exciting kind of bath.

"I wasn't," said I, on the defensive; though I couldn't be perfectly
sure what connection, if any, interviewing had with the Customs. "You
told me not to declare anything, and I didn't."

Mr. Parker, looking as if he had been melted, poured into his clothes,
and then cooled off with iced water, burst