hed head down against all his inherited traditions and national
prejudices, until her new family loathed the sight of the brisk American
face, and the poor she had tried to help, sulked in their newly drained
houses and refused to be comforted. Her ways were not Italian ways, and
she seemed to the nun-like Italian ladies, almost unsexed, as she tramped
about the fields, talking artificial manure and subsoil drainage with the
men. Yet neither she nor her husband was to blame. The young Italian
had but followed the teachings of his family, which decreed that the only
honorable way for an aristocrat to acquire wealth was to marry it. The
American wife honestly tried to do her duty in this new position, naively
thinking she could engraft transatlantic "go" upon the indolent Italian
character. Her work was in vain; she made herself and her husband so
unpopular that they are now living in this country, regretting too late
the error of their ways.
Another case but little less laughable, is that of a Boston girl with a
neat little fortune of her own, who, when married to the young Viennese
of her choice, found that he expected her to live with his family on the
third floor of their "palace" (the two lower floors being rented to
foreigners), and as there was hardly enough money for a box at the opera,
she was not expected to go, whereas his position made it necessary for
him to have a stall and appear there nightly among the men of his rank,
the astonished and disillusioned Bostonian remaining at home _en tete-a-
tete_ with the women of his family, who seemed to think this the most
natural arrangement in the world.
It certainly is astonishing that we, the most patriotic of nations, with
such high opinion of ourselves and our institutions, should be so ready
to hand over our daughters and our ducats to the first foreigner who asks
for them, often requiring less information about him than we should
consider necessary before buying a horse or a dog.
Women of no other nation have this mania for espousing aliens. Nowhere
else would a girl with a large fortune dream of marrying out of her
country. Her highest ideal of a husband would be a man of her own kin.
It is the rarest thing in the world to find a well-born French, Spanish,
or Italian woman married to a foreigner and living away from her country.
How can a woman expect to be happy separated from all the ties and
traditions of her youth? If she is taken abroad young,
|