red smile; they are never betrayed into
any enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is a sign of inexperience, of ignorance,
of want of culture. They never lose themselves in any cause; they
never heartily praise any man or woman or book; they are superior to
all tides of feeling and all outbursts of passion. They are not even
shocked at vulgarity. They are simply indifferent. They are calm,
visibly calm, painfully calm; and it is not the eternal, majestic
calmness of the Sphinx either, but a rigid, self-conscious
repression. You would like to put a bent pin in their chair when
they are about calmly to sit down.

A sitting hen on her nest is calm, but hopeful; she has faith that
her eggs are not china. These people appear to be sitting on china
eggs. Perfect culture has refined all blood, warmth, flavor, out of
them. We admire them without envy. They are too beautiful in their
manners to be either prigs or snobs. They are at once our models and
our despair. They are properly careful of themselves as models, for
they know that if they should break, society would become a scene of
mere animal confusion.

MANDEVILLE. I think that the best-bred people in the world are the
English.

THE YOUNG LADY. You mean at home.

MANDEVILLE. That's where I saw them. There is no nonsense about a
cultivated English man or woman. They express themselves sturdily
and naturally, and with no subservience to the opinions of others.
There's a sort of hearty sincerity about them that I like. Ages of
culture on the island have gone deeper than the surface, and they
have simpler and more natural manners than we. There is something
good in the full, round tones of their voices.

HERBERT. Did you ever get into a diligence with a growling
English-man who had n't secured the place he wanted?

[Mandeville once spent a week in London, riding about on the tops of
omnibuses.]

THE MISTRESS. Did you ever see an English exquisite at the San
Carlo, and hear him cry "Bwavo"?

MANDEVILLE. At any rate, he acted out his nature, and was n't afraid
to.

THE FIRE-TENDER. I think Mandeville is right, for once. The men of
the best culture in England, in the middle and higher social classes,
are what you would call good fellows,--easy and simple in manner,
enthusiastic on occasion, and decidedly not cultivated into the
smooth calmness of indifference which some Americans seem to regard
as the sine qua non of good breeding. Their position is so assured
that they do not nee