It was because he was always alive that he was not dull; but I must admit he needed plenty of human interest to keep him so.
And I think, for this reason, that the life of a good hotel, preferably a foreign one, afforded him the best opportunities for fun; he knew just how much or how little the applause of such kaleidoscopic society was worth; but it tickled his appetite for the moment and was the required sauce to his holiday rest.
The following letters to his daughter variously illustrate this aspect of him:
Eden Hotel,
Monte Carlo.
“My dear Doll,
Our little hotel at Monte Carlo is a cosy place, containing among its visitors some odd and rather lonely females, both English and American. I overheard a conversation the other night between four of them—two English and two Americans—at which your mother would like to have assisted. They evidently did not know that we were English, and let themselves go on the subject of the male sex. The leader of the band, an American lady, whose hips described a circle about as big as the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens, was especially vehement in denouncing us, though I can hardly conceive she had ever received any other cause of resentment than neglect. To an English lady, who could not compete with her in size but fairly distanced her in ugliness, she held forth at great length on the superior advantages which women enjoyed in America. “Over there,” she said, “we’ve just got men like that,” and she placed an enormous thumb on a morsel of unresisting bread to indicate where men were. “If they do anything we don’t like, why, Madam, they hear from us pretty quick. And that’s where they ought to be,” she added, “for they are just nothing but savages!” At which the gruesome English woman said that that was what she had always held to; but that, in England, she never could find any woman with the courage to say so. Then the fat American gave her country away.
“But see now,” she said, “we’ve still got to fight the law even in our country. I said to an American man, ‘do you love your wife?’ ‘Why, of course,’ he said. ‘Do you love your mother?’ I said. ‘Just don’t I,’ he replied. ‘Do you love your sister?’ ‘Why sure,’ he said. ‘Well then,’ I said to him, ‘Do you know the American constitution declares that every living citizen should have a vote except children, criminals and women.’ And then she turned to the English woman and added: “Do you know, Madam, the thought of that American law just makes me blush all over when I go to bed at night.”
I confess as I looked at her, I couldn’t think of the unrighteous law, for my mind was filled with the idea of what a wild and billowy tract of country that blush would have to traverse. Fancy the Round Pond turned into the Red Sea with a single blush.
Yours,