“It must be dreadful there,” said the pretty sister. “I daresay he’s immensely taken up,” the young man returned with a sense of conscientiously yearning toward American realities. “The gentlemen in America work too much,” his friend went on. “Oh do they? Well, I daresay they like it,” he hopefully threw out. “I don’t like it. One never sees them.” “Don’t you really?” asked Lord Lambeth. “I shouldn’t have fancied that.” “Have you come to study American manners?” the blue eyes and dark hair went on. “Oh I don’t know. I just came over for the joke of it. I haven’t got long.” Then occurred a pause, after which he began again. “But he will turn up here, won’t he?” “I certainly hope he will. He must help to entertain you and Mr. Beaumont.” Lord Lambeth looked at her from handsome eyes that were brown. “Do you suppose he’d have come down with us if we had pressed it?” The pretty girl treated this as rather an easy conundrum. “I daresay he would,” she smiled. “Really!” said the young Englishman. “Well, he was no end civil.” His young woman seemed much amused; this at least was in her eyes, which freely met Lord Lambeth’s. “He would be. He’s a perfect husband. But all Americans are that,” she confidently continued. “Really!” Lord Lambeth exclaimed again; and wondered whether all American ladies had such a passion for generalising as these two. III He sat there a good while: there was a great deal of talk; it was all pitched in a key of expression and emphasis rather new to him. Every one present, the cool maidens not least, personally addressed him, and seemed to make a particular point of doing so by the friendly repetition of his name. Three or four other persons came in, and there was a shifting of seats, a changing of places; the gentlemen took, individually, an interest in the visitors, putting somehow more imagination and more “high comedy” into this effort than the latter had ever seen displayed save in a play or a story. These well-wishers feared the two Britons mightn’t be comfortable at their hotel—it being, as one of them said, “not so private as those dear little English inns of yours.” This last gentleman added that as yet perhaps, alas, privacy wasn’t quite so easily obtained in America as might be desired; still, he continued, you could generally get it by paying for it; in fact you could get everything in America nowadays by paying for it. The life was really growing more private; it was growing greatly to resemble European—which wasn’t to be wondered at when two-thirds of the people leading it were so awfully much at home in Europe. Europe, in the course of this conversation, was indeed, as Lord Lambeth afterwards remarked to his compatriot, rather bewilderingly rubbed into them: did they pretend to be European, and when had they ever been entered under that head? Everything at Newport, at all events, was described to them as thoroughly private; they would probably find