It left me rather unmoved from my depression, even the concluding note: “The Flouds are accompanied by their English manservant, secured through the kind offices of the brother of his lordship Earl of Brinstead, the well-known English peer, who will no doubt do much to impart to the coming functions that air of smartness which distinguishes the highest social circles of London, Paris, and other capitals of the great world of fashion.”
“Some mess of words, that,” observed Cousin Egbert, and it did indeed seem to be rather intimately phrased.
“Better come along with me,” he again urged. There was a moment’s fateful silence, then, quite mechanically, I arose and prepared to accompany him. In the hall below I handed him his evening stick and gloves, which he absently took from me, and we presently traversed that street of houses much in the fashion of the Floud house and nearly all boasting some sculptured bit of wild life on their terraces.
It was a calm night of late summer; all Nature seemed at peace. I looked aloft and reflected that the same stars were shining upon the civilization I had left so far behind. As we walked I lost myself in musing pensively upon this curious astronomical fact and upon the further vicissitudes to which I would surely be exposed. I compared myself whimsically to an explorer chap who has ventured among a tribe of natives and who must seem to adopt their weird manners and customs to save himself from their fanatic violence.
From this I was aroused by Cousin Egbert, who, with sudden dismay regarding his stick and gloves, uttered a low cry of anguish and thrust them into my hands before I had divined his purpose.
“You’ll have to tote them there things,” he swiftly explained. “I forgot where I was.” I demurred sharply, but he would not listen.
“I didn’t mind it so much in Paris and Europe, where I ain’t so very well known, but my good gosh! man, this is my home town. You’ll have to take them. People won’t notice it in you so much, you being a foreigner, anyway.”
Without further objection I wearily took them, finding a desperate drollery in being regarded as a foreigner, whereas I was simply alone among foreigners; but I knew that Cousin Egbert lacked the subtlety to grasp this point of view and made no effort to lay it before him. It was clear to me then, I think, that he would forever remain socially impossible, though perhaps no bad sort from a mere human point of view.
We continued our stroll, turning presently from this residential avenue to a street of small unlighted shops, and from this into a wider and brilliantly lighted thoroughfare of larger shops, where my companion presently began to greet native acquaintances. And now once more he affected that fashion of presenting me to his friends that I had so deplored in Paris. His own greeting made, he would call out heartily: “Shake hands with my friend Colonel Ruggles!” Nor would he heed my protests at this, so that in sheer desperation I presently ceased making them, reflecting that after all we were encountering the street classes of the town.
At a score of such casual meetings I was thus presented, for he seemed to know quite almost every one and at times there would be a group of natives about us on the pavement. Twice we went into “saloons,” as they rather pretentiously style their public houses, where Cousin Egbert would stand the drinks for all present, not omitting each time to present me formally to the bar-man. In all these instances I was at once asked what I thought of their town, which was at first rather embarrassing, as I was confident that any frank disclosure of my opinion, being necessarily hurried, might easily be misunderstood. I at length devised a conventional formula of praise which, although feeling a frightful fool, I delivered each time thereafter.