"Oh, I can find out all I want to know about you in five minutes. Just come sit down with me and be a good boy. Do you want to give me your name? I wish you really were _somebody_ that had given Willie that tea fight." And while making protestations and remonstrances I was led again into that tea room and seated at a great distance from the table which had been occupied by that Mr. William Raines and Mr. Peter Scudder, who had now departed. "If you really were some big gun it would kill Willie dead." "Then, Madam, permit me to present myself to you as Robert Carruthers, Marquis de Grez and Bye, from Paris on my way to visit my Uncle, General Robert Carruthers, of the State of Harpeth. I would very willingly by information or a sword kill that Mr. William Raines of Saint Louis and I regret that--that--" At the beginning of my sentence I had drawn myself up into the attitude of the old Marquis of Flanders in the hall of the ruined Chateau de Grez, but when I had got to the point--of, shall I say, my own sword?--I was forced to collapse and I could feel my knees under the tea table begin to shake together and huddle for their accustomed and now missing skirts. "That's fine and dandy," answered the nice woman as she began to write rapidly upon the blank paper. "If you'd drawn fifty swords on Willie and he had knocked you down with the butt end of his teaspoon I'd have put Willie on the run in my write-up. Willie has handed me several little blows below the belt that I don't like. Pretends not to have met me, when Peter Scudder's own sister, whom I knew at the settlement, introduced him to me; and what he did to Mabel Wright, our cub on weddings--Oh, well, Mabel is another story. Now--that copy is ready to turn in when I pad it. I wonder if I will get a favor from the manager or be turned out of the tea room permanently for reporting a fight as aristocratic as this in the sacred halls of the Ritz-Carlton. I'd bet my shoe lacings that fifty people come here every afternoon for a week hoping it will happen again." "I do like this America, whose movement is so rapid," I made remark as I set down my second cup of tea for the afternoon, this one emptied into my depths instead of the face of Mr. Saint Louis.