While more than severe on anyone who accepts a title, there was no detail too insignificant about our Court or aristocracy that did not excite an almost emotional interest in my audiences. Every day of my tour I received letters begging me to tell them more about the life and habits of our upper classes or anything that I could "about Princess Mary's underwear." If these letters had been merely the cackle of the feminine goose who likes writing to an advertised person, I would have torn them up, but they were sometimes signed by men, and often expressed the opinions of important local editors. One night after I was in bed, having had a long talk with an intellectual reporter upon the dearth of great literature in his country, he rang me up to say his paper was annoyed that he had not brought back an accurate description of my hat and dress. He apologised profusely, but said that that was what the public really cared for: that none of our discussion upon Lincoln, Edgar Allan Poe or William James's fine style, or anything else of interest would be printed in the morning paper. But what I had said to one of the lady reporters, when we were left to ourselves, about Princess Mary's marriage being one of love, would probably be enlarged by headlines into a paragraph. I said I forgave him for waking me up, but was quite unaware that I had even mentioned our royal family. The next day I read that I had said I was: "On smoking terms with Queen Mary." You may say that certain journalism of a similar kind panders to the same curiosity in what is low and vulgar over here, but it is more harmful in the States because the press has more power. So far from guiding public opinion, the papers in America stimulate all that is worthless and credulous; and you may search in vain to find careful criticism either upon art, music or international affairs. England has been called a nation of shop-keepers, but I think we spend as much time upon the moors and playing fields as Americans do in elevators and offices. Perhaps we waste too much time on grass and games; but it has encouraged a certain aloofness and leisure, which produces a quiet mind. Whether it is from the difficulties of the climate and the overheated rooms, the voices of even the nicest people appeared to me to be loud, and however generously you may have been entertained, you are left with a sense of suffocation, which it would be difficult to explain. The excuse of being a young country will not continue to cover the rush and noise and lack of privacy that prevail; and the number of small children that I have seen in hotels, shops and restaurants that go to bed at midnight after sucking candy between enormous meals, is not promising for a nation which is always growing up.