He only needed an audience; and he had it every hour of the day in those two Armenian boys, who would stand for hours watching him throw his line over the lake and coax the fish out--just, they used to say, as he would coax the children to him in the roads or the visitors in the lounge--“sans se donner de la peine.” I am not sure of the justice of that last remark. Perhaps he never purposely gave himself trouble, but he amused others because his love of his own kind was such that he must always needs be in touch with them, be they peasant or peer, and at the end of his life he preferred to lounge in the road and chat with the convalescent soldiers in a quiet village than to sit comfortably in the seclusion of a lovely garden. It was because he was always alive that he was not dull; but I must admit he needed plenty of human interest to keep him so. And I think, for this reason, that the life of a good hotel, preferably a foreign one, afforded him the best opportunities for fun; he knew just how much or how little the applause of such kaleidoscopic society was worth; but it tickled his appetite for the moment and was the required sauce to his holiday rest. The following letters to his daughter variously illustrate this aspect of him: EDEN HOTEL, MONTE CARLO. “MY DEAR DOLL, Our little hotel at Monte Carlo is a cosy place, containing among its visitors some odd and rather lonely females, both English and American. I overheard a conversation the other night between four of them--two English and two Americans--at which your mother would like to have assisted. They evidently did not know that we were English, and let themselves go on the subject of the male sex. The leader of the band, an American lady, whose hips described a circle about as big as the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens, was especially vehement in denouncing us, though I can hardly conceive she had ever received any other cause of resentment than neglect. To an English lady, who could not compete with her in size but fairly distanced her in ugliness, she held forth at great length on the superior advantages which women enjoyed in America. “Over there,” she said, “we’ve just got men like _that_,” and she placed an enormous thumb on a morsel of unresisting bread to indicate where men were. “If they do anything we don’t like, why, Madam, they hear from us pretty quick. And that’s where they ought to be,” she added, “for they are just nothing but savages!” At which the gruesome English woman said that that was what she had always held to; but that, in England, she never could find any woman with the courage to say so. Then the fat American gave her country away.