Gee, but dad found her, and she ain't any more of a duchess than I am. Her husband is a younger son of a titled person, but there isn't money enough in the whole family to wad a gun, and our poor girl is working in a shop, or store, selling corsets to support a lazy, drunken husband and a whole mess of children, and while she is seven removes from a duchess, she does not rank with the woman who washes her mother's clothes at home. Gosh, but dad was hot when he found her, and after she told him about her situation in life he gave her a yellow-backed fifty-dollar bill, and came back to the hotel mad, and wanted to pack up and go somewhere else, where he didn't know any titled-persons.
That night a couple of dukes came around to the hotel to sell dad some stock in a diamond mine in South Africa, and they got to talking about how English society held over our crude American society, until dad got an addition to the mad he had when he called on our girl, and when one of the dukes said America was being helped socially by the marriage of American women to titled persons, dad got a hot box, like a stalled freight train.
Says dad, says he: “You Johnnies are a lot of confidence men, who live only to rope in rich American girls, so you can marry them and have their dads lift the mortgages on your ancestral estates, and put on tin roofs in place of the mortgages, 'cause a mortgage will not shed rain, and you get their money and spend it on other women.” One of the dukes turned red like a lobster, and I think he is a lobster, anyway, and he was going to make dad stop talking, but the duke didn't know dad, and he continued. Says dad, says he: “I know a rich old man in the States, who made ten million dollars on pickles, or breakfast food, and he had a daughter that was so homely they couldn't keep a clock going in the house.
“She came over here and got exposed to a duke, and she had never been vaccinated, and the first her father knew she caught the duke, and came; home, and he followed her. Say, he didn't know enough to pound sand, and the old man got several doctors for her, but they couldn't break up the duke fever, and finally the old pickle citizen asked him how much the mortgage was, and how much they could live on, and he bought her the duke, and sent them off, and the duke covered his castle with building paper, so it would hold water, and they set up housekeeping with a hundred servants. Then the duke wanted a racing stable, after the baby came, and the old pickle man went over to see the baby, and it looked so much like the old man that he invested in a racing stable, and the servants bowed low to the old man and called him 'Your 'ighness,' and that settled the old pickle person, and he fell into the trap of building a townhouse in London.
“Then he went home and made some more pickles, and the daughter cabled him to come right over, as they had been invited to entertain the king and a lot of other face cards in the pack. And the old man thought it would be great to get in the king row himself, so he shoveled a lot of big bills into some packing trunks and went over to fix up for the king. The castle had to be redecorated for about six miles, up one corridor and down the other, but Old Pickles stood the raise, because he thought it would be worth the money to be on terms of intimacy with a king.
“Then when it was all ready, and the old man was going to stand at the front door and welcome the king, they made him go to his room, back about a half a mile in the rear of the castle, and for two weeks old Pickles had his meals brought to his room, and when it was over, and his sentence had expired, he was let out, and all he saw of the grand entertainment to the crowned heads was a ravine full of empty wine bottles, a case of jimjams for a son-in-law, a case of nervous prostration for a daughter, and hydrophobia for himself. My old pickle friend has got, at this date, three million good pickle dollars invested in your d—d island, and all he has to show for it is a sick daughter, neglected by a featherhead of a husband, who will only speak to old pickles when he wants more money, and a grandchild that may die teething at any time. You are a nice lot of ducks to talk to me about your English society being better than our American civilization. You get,” and dad drove the dukes out.
I think they are going to have dad arrested for treason. But don't tell ma, 'cause she may think treason serious.