I am quartered here on Lord Poughkeepsie and his wife, such a charming couple. The weather is, we hear, intensely cold, but one doesn’t come into personal contact with it in these parts: a closed motor stands ready on the lift when you want to go “out,” and you take care to fasten all the windows before it is lowered into the porch. The same sort of thing happens, of course, at the other end. We had a most interesting dinner-party here last night with a very old American family, the van Murphy’s—he is said to have refused a knighthood, which is regarded as a frightfully desperate thing to do, out here. He says the Cleans are gaining in the East, though New York is sticky to a man; but it is the Western vote which will count. In Los Angeles it is not safe to go out of doors unless you pretend to be chewing, and some of the more peaceable citizens keep marbles in their cheeks permanently, to avoid being held up and questioned. Several of the States have already gone clean, including Maine, where the result, they tell me, has been an appalling outbreak of sweet-eating. Even here it is quite difficult to get butterscotch or barley-sugar, because there is such a lot of hoarding going on. I asked whether either party was likely to include the No-gum plank in its platform, and he said the Revolutionaries (they correspond to our Conservatives, you know) have practically pledged themselves to it. I haven’t caught the habit myself yet; it is horrible when they are chewing the stuff, but still worse when they “release” it.