‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it was in my mind to tell them that also. Xantippe’s best lecture, which she gave more than two hundred times, was on the management of the home and the husband, and in this lecture poor Socrates was made to assist. For in no other way could he hope to see the most powerful and strange region of America, which in their dialect they term the Middle West. It was also the only way he could ever pay his passage back to Athens. Many of the women who had read the teachings of a local sage, Emerson, spoke kindly to Socrates and inquired his angle on the beautiful, as though he had been Euclid. But Xantippe showed him to them as an example of the mismanaged home, blaming the spirit of Athens which did not give her authority enough, and warning the women of America to take care lest their menfolk should become too much like Socrates. But this danger they did not seem to think imminent.’ ‘Indeed,’ said Phaelon, ‘you endured much, Socrates.’ ‘Indeed he did, for Xantippe praised the women of America and the women of America praised Xantippe, and with each exchange of flattery they became more boastful and reckless. At all such gatherings the Americans, especially the women, expect to hear themselves praised. Indeed, that people is like a Persian monarch, for all who approach and speak to them desire gifts from them and endeavour to recommend themselves by flattery. Before half her tour was over Xantippe was openly saying that there were no truer lovers of the good than her audience in the whole world, and that they did quite right to be well satisfied with themselves and to have nothing to do with humility and not to believe it possible they were mistaken in what they thought to be the proper objects of the soul’s desire. And in particular she praised them for their refusal to believe there was anything requiring deep thought in philosophy or in public life, saying that people so wise and good did right to trust to their first impressions of everything. Then she told them that the idea that there was anything difficult and mysterious in life was only fit for people like Socrates, who were unfit for anything but philosophy. And she explained that the reason that more thinking was done in Europe, and that there was more philosophical discussion there, was that people had so much time on their hands while waiting for their passports to the United States. For these passports, she said, are as long in coming as a conclusion is in the chatterings of Socrates and his friends, and the Europeans spend the time in philosophy hoping to learn resignation and the acceptance of one’s destiny. Because more and more often the passport is in the end refused, and nowhere more often than among the Greeks. She is already full with engagements for such addresses for the next two years.’