Where is your young Englishman? I adore young Englishmen, and why doesn't yours come to see me? Did you give him the letter? He has been in Washington a week, is constantly at the P----'s, and all the diplomatic corps are entertaining him. The women are mad about him, he's so awfully good-looking. If you want a house in Washington next winter why not rent ours? We are going to Rome in December. Yours, always cordially, GERTRUDE LEMAIRE. IV _Letter from Mr. Hamilton-Locks to the Hon. Forbes Redding._ WASHINGTON, January, '97. My dear Old Chap: This place is a very good sort, rather like a little English Paris; more cosmopolitan than Boston, I mean, tho' no other city here seems quite so lively as New York. The embassy is giving me no end of a good time. I'm sure I'm more than grateful to your uncle. I find society in this place is more like European without trying to be, while in New York they try more, and _aren't_. New York society has an air of its own, and, I must say, it's a damn fine air, too. Of course, like other places, it has some frumps, and what Blanche Heton meant by giving me a letter to a Mrs. Joslyn is more than meets the eye. But we are not burnt twice by the same flame. The _lady_ gave me in turn a letter to some one here, and I was so afraid I'd forget and use it by mistake, or leave it at the woman's door one day when I'd been drinking a good many whiskeys and sodas and didn't care what I did, that I tore it into bits and dropped them in an umbrella stand in Mrs. Joslyn's hall five minutes after she gave it to me. There's no use in running any risks. And when a woman over here _is_ stupid she's damn stupid. So is she superlatively fetching when she is charming. And, by Jove! but they know how to draw the line--all but Mrs. Joslyn. People over on this side think every Englishman comes over after a wife, and at first they pretend to be very haughty and independent, and then if they find out he is not after a wife after all, like your humble servant, they are quite angry about it. I hope you're keeping an eye on my dogs for me. Love to Millicent. Yours, TED. Wagner, 1897 _A Letter from Lady Aires to the Countess of Upham, at Homburg_. BAYREUTH, Aug., 1897. My dear Rose: