So, leaving all this, one is not really leaving a life-in-common. If I go to see a baseball game, what is it to me that ten thousand others are also there watching it? The real question is: of how much value to me and to _each_ of the ten thousand is the baseball game? Also, leaving all this, one is thrown frankly upon himself. Living among people who speak a different language and have different customs, he can no longer be supported by that illusory sense of companionship. If he has any strength of character he presently finds this an immense relief and becomes aware that at home his time was recklessly wasted on a thousand things that meant nothing to him--that did not touch his mind or his heart. To take the most trivial example, the telephone system in Italy or France is so bad that there he will almost never use a telephone; which at once frees him from something very like tyranny. This sense of freedom is not the least of the advantages of living abroad. In large part, no doubt, it comes from one’s not really belonging to the life about one, since however well one gets to know a foreign country it always remains foreign, and though one acquire fluency in the language it must always, unless learned in childhood, be spoken more consciously--and conscientiously--than one’s own. But this is not the whole story. One is, too, aware of a greater freedom surrounding him in European--at least in Latin European--countries than in his own America. There is stronger individualism, less herd spirit, greater divergence of opinion. Individuals appear less like one another, and eccentricities that would almost ostracize men from their disapproving fellows in America are in France and Italy accepted with a smile. The sensitive American, especially if he is one of the many who have suffered bitterly at school and college and dully afterward from the intolerable oppression of herd standards, breathes in this relative freedom deeply with a sense of sudden release. It is true that after a while, if he is observant, he perceives that the liberty is not, as perhaps he first thought it, something deep affecting the fundamentals of life, but, rather, a freedom from unnecessary rules for existence. He may even come to explain it as the result of a number of very superficial things--the comparative absence of standardizing advertisements, for example, the lack of universally read magazines, the smaller size of newspapers, the greater localism of feeling--though whether such things are cause or result remains a question to him. At any rate, even when estimated at only its proper importance, the sense of freedom still remains as something gracious.