Some day she’ll poison the soup or the _vin rouge_, but I hope that won’t be until after mother and I shall have left her. She has two daughters who, except that one’s decidedly pretty, are meagre imitations of herself. The “family,” for the rest, consists altogether of our beloved compatriots and of still more beloved Englanders. There’s an Englander with his sister, and they seem rather decent. He’s remarkably handsome, but excessively affected and patronising, especially to us Americans; and I hope to have a chance of biting his head off before long. The sister’s very pretty and apparently very nice, but in costume Britannia incarnate. There’s a very pleasant little Frenchman—when they’re nice they’re charming—and a German doctor, a big blond man who looks like a great white bull; and two Americans besides mother and me. One of them’s a young man from Boston—an esthetic young man who talks about its being “a real Corot day,” and a young woman—a girl, a female, I don’t know what to call her—from Vermont or Minnesota or some such place. This young woman’s the most extraordinary specimen of self-complacent provinciality that I’ve ever encountered; she’s really too horrible and too humiliating. I’ve been three times to Clémentine about your underskirt, etc. IV FROM LOUIS LEVERETT IN PARIS TO HARVARD TREMONT IN BOSTON _September_ 25. MY DEAR HARVARD, I’ve carried out my plan, of which I gave you a hint in my last, and I only regret I shouldn’t have done it before. It’s human nature, after all, that’s the most interesting thing in the world, and it only reveals itself to the truly earnest seeker. There’s a want of earnestness in that life of hotels and railroad-trains which so many of our countrymen are content to lead in this strange rich elder world, and I was distressed to find how far I myself had been led along the dusty beaten track. I had, however, constantly wanted to turn aside into more unfrequented ways—to plunge beneath the surface and see what I should discover. But the opportunity had always been missing; somehow I seem never to meet those opportunities that we hear about and read about—the things that happen to people in novels and biographies. And yet I’m always on the watch to take advantage of any opening that may present itself; I’m always looking out for experiences, for sensations—I might almost say for adventures.