Don’t you think those lines fine? Do I quote them right?”
“Yes—I think so—that is,” stammered Frothingham, “it’s a jolly brook, but we call it a river.” Then to himself: “What an ass she’ll think me!” But the starting sweat stayed, for she asked him no more questions; and he, freed from the anxiety of having to try to soar with her, was able to sit quietly and enjoy her beauty, and the murmurous rush of her low, musical voice—“It’s like the brook that brute she quoted wrote about,” he thought.
He did not drive home with his party, but accepted Wallingford’s invitation to walk in the fresh night air to his club. “Your American women are tremendously clever,” he said, as they were strolling along. He was feeling dazed and dizzy from the whirl of his emotions, the whirls and shocks Catherine Hollister had given his brain.
“Yes, they’re clever,” replied Wallingford, “but not in the way they think they are. Take Kitty Hollister, for example. She’s all right when she wants to be. She thinks sense. But what a raft of fuzzy trash she does float out when she gets a-going. I pitied you this evening. She laid herself out to impress you. You’re staying in the house with her, aren’t you? I suppose she whoops it up whenever you’re round?”
“I find her very clever—and interesting,” said Frothingham somewhat stiffly.
“Of course she is. I’ve known her for seventeen of the nineteen years she’s gladdened the earth—and I ought to know her pretty well. But she’s like a lot of the women in this town. They haven’t any emotions to speak of—nothing emotional happens. But they think they ought to have emotions such as they read about, and so they fake ’em. Then, they’ve got the craze for culture. They haven’t the time to get the real thing—they’re too busy showing off. Besides, they’re too lazy. So they fake culture, too. Oh, yes, they’re clever. And they look so well that you like the fake as they parade it better than the real thing.”
“We have that sort in London,” said Frothingham.
“So I’ve observed. But it’s done rather better there—they’re older hands at it. If you weren’t an Englishman, I’d say it fitted in better among the other shams. I suppose you’ve noticed that many people here are imitation English or French? You’ve seen the tags ‘Made in England,’ ‘Made in France,’ ‘Made in England, finished in France’?”
“I’ve noticed similarities,” replied Frothingham tactfully.
“It’s all imitation stuff—the labels are frauds. We over here don’t know how to be gracefully idle and inane, as your upper classes do. It’s not in us anywhere. We haven’t the tradition—our tradition is all against it. Whenever we do produce a thoroughly idle and inane person, he or she goes abroad to live, or else loses all his money to some sharp, pushing fellow, and drops out of sight. All this aristocracy you see is pure pose. Underneath, they’re Americans.”