“Humph! You’re the English people! I saw a British emblem on a car outside, and it’s easy to see you are the ones it belongs to!”
We denied the nationality but claimed the car.
She shrugged her shoulders:
“Well, if you aren’t English, you’re either from New York or Boston—it amounts to the same thing! Ever been to Europe?”
We had.
“Ever been out here before?”
We hadn’t.
“I knew it! I knew it the very first moment I clapped eyes on you!”
Like a phonograph she recited a long tirade on the topic of the “Americans who go spend money in Europe and neglect their own country.” She asserted the superiority of our own land over that of every other in generalities and in detail, ending with a final thrust: “What can you get over there, I’d like to know, that you can’t get here?”
She asserted that a two-hundred-thousand-dollar collection of modern paintings was far more worth seeing than the incomparable masterpieces of Italy; she declared that Egypt and Pompeii held no treasures comparable with the New Mexican cliff-dwellings.