"When I left, the husband accompanied me to the door. Before I took leave, he twinkled with his right eye, and asked me with a knowing look, 'Well, sir, what do you think of the linguistic range of my madame?' "I did not quite know what to reply. At last I said: 'Like a true soldier she fights on the borderland.' "One of the strangest things to note in London society is the fascination exercised by American women on Englishmen. Many of the really intelligent men among the English are practically lost as soon as the American woman begins playing with the little lasso of thin ropes which she carries about her in the shape of an acquired brightness and a studied vivacity. The most glaring defects of those women do not seem to exist for the average Englishman. He takes her loud brightness for French _esprit_ dished up to him in intelligible English. Her total lack of self-restraint and modesty he takes for a charming _abandon_. The real fact is that he is afraid of her. She may have many a bump: she certainly has not that of reverence. Her irreverent mind makes light of the _grandezza_ of Englishmen, and thus cows him by his fear of making himself ridiculous. "The first American woman (--_sit venia verbo_, as you would say, O Cicero--) I met in London was one married to an English lord. She was tall, well-built, with rich arms and hips, an expressive head, very fond of the arts, more especially of music. Even her head, which was a trifle square, indicated that. When she learnt that I really was the famous Alcibiades, her excitement knew no bounds. She was good enough to explain it to me: "'Just fancy that! Alcibiades! (They pronounce my name Elkibidees.) I am simply charmed! I have so far every year introduced some new and striking personage into drawing-rooms, in order to stun the natives of this obsolete island. I have brought into fashion one-legged dancers; three-legged calves; single-minded thought-readers; illusionists; disillusionists; disemotionists; dancers classical, mediæval, and hyper-modern; French lectures on the isle of Lesbos, after a series of discourses on the calves of the legs of Greek goddesses in marble; not to forget my unique course of lectures given at the drawing-room of the dearest of all duchesses, on the history of _décolletage_. "'This year, to be quite frank with you, Mr Elkibidees, I meant to arrange in the magnificent drawing-room of an Oriental English lady, the uniquest and at the same time the boldest exhibition ever offered to the dear nerves of any class of women. I cannot quite tell you what it was going to be. I can only faintly indicate that it was to be a collection of all the oldest as well as latest inventions securing the tranquillity of enjoying just one child in the family. This, I have no doubt, would have been the greatest sensation of the season.