Steaming northward, the weather turned delightfully cold, and I revelled in it, reviving myself after the strenuously exhausting days of our crowded week in Havana. When we picked up our pilot off Sandy Hook I was on the upper deck, promenading happily in the chill wind in light clothes, and the pilot remarked to one of the boat’s officers that it “was dangerous for that young girl” to be exposed in such a way to such weather. He was told that I was “the Spanish Infanta,” and he laughed uproariously at the idea; and the more seriously the officer assured him of it the more he enjoyed the joke. I saw him looking at me and laughing, so I inquired what was the matter; and when I found out I was slightly puzzled. His amusement proved to be typical of my whole reception in the United States. As one of the newspapers put it, they had expected a “big, dark Spanish princess with a black moustache,” and it was with a tickled surprise that they found me “like any of the girls you see walking down Fifth Avenue.” Their pleased curiosity was reflected in the accounts that the reporters gave of me. No conceivable personal detail escaped them. One reporter even discovered that I had a gold crown on one of my back teeth, and I was mystified to know how he could have seen it. Surely my smile was not so broad as all that! I tried myself before a mirror. No! By no possible grimace could I expose that tooth. I remained mystified. I do still. The amusement, however, was not altogether on their side. The newspapers had not prepared me for this familiar but kindly tone of the American Press; and the people of European countries had not the simple benevolence of the curiosity that brought the smiling crowds to greet me in the United States. The American young girl is the spoiled darling of the nation, and they were all as willing to spoil me--and I was willing to be spoiled--by their almost affectionate and chivalrous desire to give me “a good time.” I cannot pretend that I saw anything at all of the problems of government in the country--nothing of the poverty, of the industrial exploitation, of the inequalities of opportunity and the control by the moneyed classes, of which we have since come to hear so much in all the kingdoms and republics and democracies of this changing world. I was merely a caller in the parlour. I knew nothing of the family life in the house, much less of the difficulties below-stairs.