If you like your bath at a certain hour, you would do well to ask your bath steward for it as soon as you go on board (unless you have a private bath of your own), since the last persons to speak get the inconvenient hours—naturally. To many the daily salt bath is the most delightful feature of the trip. The water is always wonderfully clear and the towels are heated.
If you have been ill on the voyage, some ship's doctors send in a bill; others do not. In the latter case you are not actually obliged to give them anything, but the generously inclined put the amount of an average fee in an envelope and leave it for the doctor at the purser's office.
Dress On The Steamer
On the de luxe steamers nearly every one dresses for dinner; some actually in ball dresses, which is in worst possible taste, and, like all over-dressing in public places, indicates that they have no other place to show their finery. People of position never put on formal evening dress on a steamer, not even in the à la carte restaurant, which is a feature of the de luxe steamer of size. In the dining saloon they wear afternoon house dresses—without hats—for dinner. In the restaurant they wear semi-dinner dresses. Some smart men on the ordinary steamers put on a dark sack suit for dinner after wearing country clothes all day, but in the de luxe restaurant they wear Tuxedo coats. No gentleman wears a tail-coat on shipboard under any circumstances whatsoever.
Just as one discordant note makes more impression than all the others that are correctly played in an entire symphony, so does a discordant incident stand out and dominate a hundred others that are above criticism, and therefore unnoticed.
In every country of Europe and Asia are Americans who combine the brilliancy which none can deny is the birthright of the newer world, with the cultivation and good breeding of the old. These Americans of the best type go all over the world, fitting in so perfectly with their background that not even the inhabitants notice they are strangers; in other words they achieve the highest accomplishment possible.
But in contrast to these, the numberless discordant ones are only too familiar; one sees them swarming over Europe in bunches, sometimes in hordes, on regular professionally run tours. This, of course, does not mean that all personally conducted tourists are anything like them. The objectionables are loud of voice, loud in manner; they always attract as much attention as possible to themselves, and wave American flags on all occasions.
The American flag is the most wonderful emblem in the whole world, and ours is the most glorious country too, but that does not mean that it is good taste to wave our flag for no reason whatever. At a parade or on an especial day when other people are waving flags, then let us wave ours by all means—but not otherwise. It does not dignify our flag to make it an object of ridicule to others, and that is exactly the result of the ceaseless flaunting of it by a group of people who talk at the top of their voices, who deliberately assume that the atmosphere belongs to them, and who behave like noisy, untrained savages trying to "show off." In hotels, on excursions, steamers and trains, they insist on talking to everyone, whether everyone wants to talk or not. They are "all over the place"—there is no other way to express it—and they allow privacy to no one if they can help it.
Numberless cultivated Americans traveling in Europe never by any chance speak English or carry English books on railroad trains, as a protection against the other type of American who allows no one to travel in the same compartment and escape conversation. The only way to avoid unwelcome importunities is literally to take refuge in assuming another nationality.