I had experienced
some prejudices against the inhabitants of the North-American republic,
though not on account of great experience of my own. A year previously I
had made a disastrous excursion to Monte Carlo in the company of a
young gentleman of London who had been for several weeks in New York and
Washington and Boston, and appeared to know very much of the country.
He was never anything but tired in speaking of it, and told me a
great amount. He said many times that in the hotels there was never a
concierge or portier to give you information where to discover the best
vaudeville; there was no concierge at all! In New York itself, my
friend told me, a facchino, or species of porter, or some such
good-for-nothing, had said to him, including a slap on the shoulder,
"Well, brother, did you receive your delayed luggage correctly?" (In
this instance my studies of the North-American idiom lead me to
believe that my friend was intentionally truthful in regard to the
principalities, but mistaken in his observation of detail.) He declared
the recent willingness of the English to take some interest in the
United-Statesians to be a mistake; for their were noisy, without real
confidence in themselves; they were restless and merely imitative
instead of inventive. He told me that he was not exceptional; all
Englishmen had thought similarly for fifty or sixty years; therefore,
naturally, his opinion carried great weight with me. And myself, to my
astonishment, I had often seen parties of these republicans become all
ears and whispers when somebody called a prince or a countess passed
by. Their reverence for age itself, in anything but a horse, had often
surprised me by its artlessness, and of all strange things in the world,
I have heard them admire old customs and old families. It was strange to
me to listen, when I had believed that their land was the only one
where happily no person need worry to remember who had been his
great-grandfather.

The greatest of my own had not saved me from the decoration of the
past week, yet he was as much mine as he was Antonio Caravacioli's; and
Antonio, though impoverished, had his motor-car and dined well, since
I happened to see, in my perusal of the journal, that he had been to
dinner the evening before at the English Embassy with a great company.
"Bravo, Antonio! Find a rich foreign wife if you can, since you cannot
do well for yourself at home!" And I could say so honestly, without
spite,