“My dear, is what you said true?” she asked, with the greatest concern.
“No, not a word of it,” I replied.
“Then why did you say it to the poor girl?”
“To deceive her, and play an American joke on her.”
The principal stared at me an instant, and then burst into immoderate laughter. She called the victim and the other older girls to her and explained my joke, and they all went into peels of laughter. In spite of its inauspicious beginning my American joke was a huge success; and I could not understand why both the principal and my “mother” united—after their amusement had subsided—in cautioning me to make no more American jokes.
For one year I stayed at the school; then, having saved some money from my private lessons, and having enough pupils assured me for the coming year, I decided to leave the school and go into a private family, for the sake of my English, and also in order to see American home life. I still felt very ignorant about the American people: in their own way they were so complex, and they could not be judged by European standards.
Almost with stupefaction do I read the interviews reported by the newspapers with distinguished and undistinguished foreigners, who, after a few days’ sojourn in the United States, and a bird’s-eye view of the country, give out their comprehensive and eulogistic opinions. They fill me with amazement, and I wonder whether these other foreigners are so much cleverer than I, or whether they are playing an American joke on the American people.
The family with whom I went to live turned out to be a Danish husband with a German wife. Their children, however, were born and brought up in America, so that I did mingle with Americans of the first generation. That year away from school enabled me to poke around a lot, in all sorts of corners and by-corners of New York. I took my luncheon daily in a different place, and spoke to all sorts of people, and heard what they had to say. The papers I read faithfully, and every free evening I would attend some public meeting, from a spiritualistic séance to any sort of a lecture. I also spent one entire night in the streets of New York. All the afternoon I slept. At seven o’clock I dressed and went to dinner alone in one of the so-called best restaurants of Broadway, and then to the play. The time between half-past eleven and five in the morning I spent in walking in Broadway and in Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Avenues. I took the elevated train to the Battery, then up to Harlem, and down again by another line. New York at night is very different from New York in the daytime. It seemed to me that even the types which inhabited it were different, and I saw a great deal which was not pleasant to see; but no one bothered me, either by word or look.
Before this year I used to think that to be absolutely free, to go and come as I pleased, would be the acme of happiness; to have no one to question my actions, to be responsible only to myself would be the koryphe of freedom. Yet this year, when I was free to go and come as I pleased, and had no one to whom I had to give any account of my actions, I found to be the most desolate of my life, and my freedom weighed on me far more than ever restraint had at home. I came to realize that though an individual I was part of a whole, and must remain a part of that whole in order to enjoy life.
That year humanized me, so to speak, and made me understand the reason for much that I used to laugh at before—such, for example, as the spinster’s devotion to her rector, to settlement work, or even to a parrot, a cat, or a dog. Whenever now I see a woman in a carriage with a dog on her lap, I may join with those who laugh at her; but at the same time I wonder if it may not be poverty and loneliness of life which make that woman, rich in money, lavish the treasures of her heart on a dumb creature.