There was an uncomfortable pause, and the young woman who had spoken protested she had not meant it so seriously. She had only meant the girl was a trifle _passée_ and travel-worn. But when the women had left the table, one of the men laughed, and said: "You are quite like a breeze from the piny woods at home. I suppose we do talk rather thoughtlessly over here, but then none of us take what we say of each other as absolute truth." The other men all agreed to this, and protested that no one took them or what they said seriously. They were quite right, and, as a matter of fact, it would be unjust to them to do so, except to pity them. The Man without a Country was no more unfortunate than they. It is true they have Henry's bar, where they can get real American cocktails, and the Travellers', where they can play real American poker; but that is as near as they ever get to anything that savors of our country, and they do not get as near as that towards anything that savors of the Frenchman's country. They have their own social successes, and their own salons and dinner-parties, but the Faubourg St.-Germain is as strange a territory to many of them as though it were situated in the heart of the Congo Basin. Of course there are many fine, charming, whole-souled, and clean-minded American women in Paris. They are the wives of bankers or merchants or the representatives of the firms which have their branches in Paris and London as well as New York. And there are hundreds more of Americans who are in Paris because of its art, the cheapness of its living, and its beauty. I am not speaking of them, and should they read this they will understand. The American in Paris of whom one longest hesitates to speak is the girl or woman who has married a title. She has been so much misrepresented in the press, and so misunderstood, and she suffers in some cases so acutely without letting it be known how much she suffers, that the kindest word that could be said of her is not half so kind as silence. No one can tell her more distinctly than she herself knows what her lot is, or how few of her illusions have been realized. It is not a case where one can point out grandiloquently that uneasy lies the head that wears a coronet; it is not magnificent sorrow; it is just pathetic, sordid, and occasionally ridiculous. To treat it too seriously would be as absurd as to weep over a man who had allowed himself to be fooled by a thimblerigger; only in this case it is a woman who has been imposed upon, and who asks for your sympathy.