One had no more than put foot on the quay at Naples before the atmosphere of fateful hesitation in which Italy had lived for eight months became evident to the senses of the traveler. Naples was less strident, less vocal than ever before. That mob of hungry Neapolitans, which usually seizes violent hold of the stranger and his effects, was thin and spiritless. Naples was almost quiet. The Santa Lucia was deserted; the line of pretentious hotels with drawn shutters had the air of a summer resort out of season. The war had cut off Italy's greatest source of ready money--the idler. Naples was living to itself a subdued, zestless life. Cook's was an empty inutility. The sunny slopes of Sorrento, where during the last generation the German has established himself in all favorable sites, were thick with signs of sale. In other respects there were indications of prosperity--more building, cleaner streets, better shops. In the dozen years since I had been there, Italy had undoubtedly prospered, and even this beggar's paradise of sun and tourists had bettered itself after the modern way. I saw abundant signs of the new Italy of industrial expansion, which under German tutelage had begun to manufacture, to own ships, and to exploit itself. And there were also signs of war-time bloat--the immense cotton business. Naples as well as Genoa was stuffed with American cotton, the quays piled with the bales that could not be got into warehouses. It took a large credulity to believe that all this cotton was to satisfy Italian wants. Cotton, as everybody knew, was going across the Alps by the trainload. Nevertheless, our ship, which had a goodly amount of the stuff, was held at Gibraltar only a day until the English Government decided to accept the guarantees of consul and Italian Ambassador that it was legitimately destined for Italian factories--a straw indicating England's perplexity in the cotton business, especially with a nation that might any day become an ally! It would be wiser to let a little more cotton leak into Germany through Switzerland than to agitate the question of contraband at this delicate moment. The cotton brokers, the grain merchants, and a few others were making money out of Italy's neutrality, and _neutralista_ sentiment was naturally strong among these classes and their satellites. No doubt they did their best to give an impression of nationalism to the creed of their pockets. But a serious-minded merchant from Milan who dined opposite me on the way to Rome expressed the prevailing beliefs of his class as well as any one,--"War, yes, in time.... It must come.... But first we must be ready--we are not quite ready yet"; and he predicted almost to a day when Italy, finding herself ready, would enter the great conflict. He showed no enthusiasm either for or against war: his was a curiously fatalistic attitude of mind, an acceptance of the inevitable, which the American finds so hard to understand.